About

Chinatown-based painter Kan Seidel (b. 1987, Omaha, NE) moved to New York City from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and began working as a writer and LGBT activist in Lower Manhattan in early 2015. He painted recreationally in the ensuing years working in oil paint and gouache. Often portraying distorted figures tumbling through surreal domestic spaces, he subverts his midwestern upbringing through the lens of a big city dweller; finding fascination in the repressed urges, social conformity and politeness of the Midwestern character. After the passing of a sibling in 2021, the artist began to fully immerse himself in painting, feverishly coding and uncoding familial scars and psychic losses with figures becoming more and more stretched and distorted. In these works there is a prominent focus on the concept of the home and the family; the works riding a line between comedy and tragedy. More recently, Seidel has brought his quirky figures into the third dimension as ceramics in a continued exploration of bodies in space.

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