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Kevin SloanMiracle of the Great Shell2025
2025
$9,800
£7,572.20
€8,754.18
CA$13,848.11
A$15,531.57
CHF 8,133.65
MX$188,723.78
NOK 103,283.67
SEK 97,920.20
DKK 65,345.35
About the Item
In a time of profound environmental change, Kevin Sloan’s images depict rare beauty intertwined with puzzlement. Part art, part artifice, his painstaking vignettes of animals posed in unusual and unlikely places read like old-fashioned studio portraits with contrived natural backgrounds attempting to project the sitters’ mood or status. The shutter speed is slow as fauna ranging from zebras to dolphins teeter in their liminal, confined spaces. Many stand on beaches or dangle in marshy estuaries at low tide, caught in the fragile moment before the Earth’s gravitational pull returns water to the beach. Are they safe or vulnerable? Are these works memorials or monuments? Do they mourn the loss of something rare and sacred, or do they enshrine and elevate it? Kevin’s characters navigate an eerie, challenging world yet exude an unexpected stillness and calm. Sloan embraces this duality.
Perhaps it’s not coincidental that for the past five years, the artist’s studio has been housed in a former Romanian Orthodox church, where, for over a century, the sanctuary walls were adorned with painted icons of saints and holy figures. These icons, typically featuring a singular, centrally located subject, were sacred and used in worship, meditation, and spiritual contemplation. While not emulating these icons directly, Sloan incorporates the symbolism and metaphor that lends them an otherworldly quality. As with the icons, the fantastical, familiar, sacred, and mundane coexist in a shared space.
- Creator:Kevin Sloan (1958, American)
- Creation Year:2025
- Dimensions:Height: 48 in (121.92 cm)Width: 42 in (106.68 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Denver, CO
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1387216716902
Kevin Sloan
Kevin Sloan is a Denver-based painter working primarily with acrylic on canvas with forays into drawings, paintings on paper, and recently, ceramic and mixed media sculpture. Growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, his early interest in art was nurtured by student classes at the Des Moines Art Center and in particular by their artist-in-residence, Frank Limone. It was clear upon his high school graduation that he would study art in college. Kevin received a BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art in 1981 where he studied with Stephen Greene and Stanley Whitney. He continued his formal education at the University of Arizona studying with James G. Davis, where he received an MFA in Painting in 1984. His curiosity and love of travel led him to live and work in a wide variety of cities across the United States including San Francisco, New York City, New Orleans, Key West, and Santa Fe. All these locales have had a lasting impact on his practice. Kevin’s work is characterized by curiosity and bemusement toward the natural and human-made world. His frequently symbolic paintings are part of an ongoing inquiry into the relationship between the marvel of the natural world and the mundane and often blunt reality of the modern era. In addition to his studio practice, he has been a visiting artist-in-residence at universities around the United States and occasionally teaches upper-level painting classes in Denver. He exhibits regularly in one-person and group exhibits around the world. His work is found in numerous private and public collections worldwide including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florid; and the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona. Kevin currently works in a converted church in the historic Denver neighborhood of Globeville where in addition to painting, he grows flowers and vegetables in the summer months. He shares his life with his husband Mark and two spirited Labradoodles, Otis and Poppy.
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