For his first exhibition at SHAHEEN since 2004, Kucia continues his painterly exploration of the visual and psychological spaces that arise between memory and imagination, ultimately arriving at images that are rooted in personal and collective experience, yet tinged with an element of the fantastic and otherworldly. While Kucia continues to incorporate images of flora, fauna and the occasional human figure into his compositions, his recent work has become increasingly pre-occupied with the depiction of commonplace objects. Selected for their metaphorical characteristics, personal relevance (to the artist), and ability to act as surrogates for human entities, the often banal items and animals that populate Kucia’s vaguely narrative scenes are also chosen for their capacity to round-out and balance composition, as the artist continues to equipoise his storytelling impulse with his strong formalist concerns. Through the artist’s multifarious and lively paint handling and sophisticated compositional sensibility, the animate and inanimate in his paintings tend to reverse roles, as human and animal figures become objectified and objects take on a life of their own. The resulting paintings convey the feeling of being simultaneously awake and dreaming. As with most of Kucia’s work of the past ten years, his recent paintings tend to slip freely between genres, ultimately eluding easy classification.
Over the past four years, Kucia’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kevin Bruk Gallery, Miami, FL; The Art and Cultural Center of Hollywood, Hollywood, FL; and an early-career retrospective/survey exhibition at Florida Southern College’s Melvin Art Gallery, which was accompanied by a catalogue. Kucia’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Mugrabi Family Collection; and Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland. Kucia received his B.A. in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999, and went on to study at London’s Chelsea School of Art (2002-2003) before returning to Cleveland. Kucia currently lives and works in Miami, FL.