Dennis Hollingsworth

Will Cotton at Michael Kohn Gallery Tonight

We get to meet Will Cotton tonight. Here is a snip from the press release:

For his new work Cotton has designed items of clothing specifically for the fictional space that the characters inhabit. He created a dress based on a foil cupcake wrapper, as well as one actually composed of cupcake papers, a skirt made of cotton candy with a rock candy bodice, cake hats, and candy tiaras; all worn by the models as they posed for the paintings. This body of work merges portraiture, landscape painting, decadent fashion, and Cotton?s interest in the role of bodily decoration as a signifier of status and taste.

While in the past, Cotton has seen his figures as representative of a generalized archetype so as to place greater emphasis on their utopian surroundings, this new body of work begins to explore more specific characters, with an interest in emotion and interior narrative. This coincided with the painting of recognizable pop figure, Katy Perry, who brought her own character and personality to the paintings (several of which will be included in this exhibition).