Kurt Kauper Diva Fictions Paintings

Kurt Kauper is best known for his traditional and large looking series of Diva Fictions paintings. He was born in 1966 and is from Indianapolis, However, in later years he went to New York in order to work and live there. In the year1988 he received his BFA from the University of Boston. In 1995 he went to the University of California, Los Angeles, CA to pursue his MFA in painting from UCLA.

Painter Kurt Kauper is primarily known for Diva series of fictional portraits where the subjects of the pieces contain constructed identities and composites of many people. Mr Kauper experienced several solo shows and exhibitions where he was thoroughly involved with many participating groups including the 2000 Whitney Biennial. As an eminent person he received numerous awards including a Tiffany Foundation Grant in 1999, the Pollack-Krasner and two Elizabeth Green shields grants.

In the spring and summer of 2000, Kurt Kauper had his work displayed at the Whitney Biennial. He appeared concurrently with his exhibition of Diva Fictions at Deitch Projects. Notably Kurt Kaupers Diva Fictions featured his exclusive paintings of imaginary Opera Divas. The most significant part of his work reflects the use of vernacular of painterly realism. The purpose was to create an imaginary world of entirely invented or an artificial person, who never existed in reality but appears to have a personal history as real and verifiable.

Kurt Kauper has done paintings of divas that are actually the series of Divas of visual record. It is an invented history that the viewers are looking for in his painting. Kaupers Diva Fictions basically occupied a place somewhere between realism and artificiality. It lies in the territory of ambiguity where the symbolic power plays the most resonant part. The most recent series of Kaupers include The Carey Grant Series that was once showed in the travelling exhibition of Dear Painter at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kunsthalle Wien and Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt.

Kurt Kauper had his recent solo exhibition took place at ACME, Los Angeles in the year 2003. Importantly the Deitch Projects were also looking forward to an exhibition with Kurt Kauper in the upcoming season of 2006 and 2007. His unique creation of life-sized and blush-inducing paintings of naked Cary Grant was the hilarious masterworks of social-mores provocation.

His career made him to work and teach at Orange Coast College, Otis College of Art and Design, the Museum School in Boston, Yale University School of Art in New Haven, and is currently working as a Professor at Queens College in NY. Kurt Kauper is a great painter and one of the best in the contemporary times. Across the globe his paintings are in much demand. Drury