Kathleen Keifer

The Palm Is Soft

2021

Kathleen Keifer is a California based internationally collected artist. She is a leading force of New California Realism. With a high level of technical virtuosity, Keifer creates a new sense of reality with textures and colors that seem to add lighting effects and distinct shadows, confronting the viewer with new interpretations of familiar objects. Keifer’s paintings invite the viewer to consider the complex relationship between time and timelessness. It is the sheer visual interaction between the elements, taken in their bare simplicity that interests her. For her, the painting captures the very essence of time and its passage. She believes that actual sites and places have individual magic. The goal is to take objects from popular culture and paint them in a new narrative context. Her complex approaches to popular board games present the subjects as living, tangible objects. Keifer’s interest took her to paint bits and pieces of board games. Her husband had been designing and inventing board games for thirty years and her homes and studios are filled with games and playing pieces. She is fascinated with the response these board games (and bits and pieces) evoke in us as adults. Sure there's the tug of childhood and nostalgia, the innocence of playing a game with clear rules and clear winners. But somehow these board games live in an unconscious dream-realm where they represent something more than the detritus of playtime. All the while she is painting them in the context of living in Los Angeles, a cultural capital filled with pop art and pop culture. Born and raised in Chicago, Kathleen Keifer is a second-generation artist. Her mother, also a fine artist, exposed Keifer to the world of art and supervised her training from a very early age. This legacy continues today as Keifer closely nurtures the development of the artistic leaning in each of her three daughters, inspiring a third generation of female artists. Her works are represented by Artspace Warehouse, Los Angeles and have been exhibited and collected internationally, including Chicago, New York and London.