BIOGRAPHY

“My affinity for creating comes from my desire to analyze and absorb as much as I can about the world around me in an effort to better interpret our seemingly inexplicable existence.”

When working around the theme of the human condition the accent is usually on the fundamentals of existence—birth, growth, conflict, emotionality, and mortality—through the use of the human form. With an avid interest in the subject, Kinsey began his artistic journey in the 1990s alternating between Street Art and design, coincidentally setting the stage for his path as a painter along the way. His tenet towards the human condition, as well as social and environmental disruptions would come to define the development of the works over the next decade. The pivotal point for this shift was his move to the Sierra Nevada mountains north of Los Angeles in 2010, where he witnessed the raw nature and its changing essence which in our experience translates as life. Through the mind and hands of a trained designer, illustrator, and accomplished painter, these new elements informed the type of process indicative of the artist’s development as a person. Departing from the recognizable line-based characters with exaggerated facial features and empty eyes, Kinsey moved towards totemic assemblages of organic shapes and elements, suggestive of the new surroundings and the natural environment.

Through this new lens, the landforms, plants, and shapes, marked not only a personal understanding, but also humanity’s oneness with nature, while the extra time away from past endeavors provided a unique opportunity to excel in his personal work and process. The understanding that reality goes beyond what we can see or touch pushed the explorations of the abstracted figure-based assemblages towards more detailed and emotionally suggestive forms. Simultaneously, Kinsey’s ongoing interest in sculpture finally took form around 2017 when he started freeform cutting basic wood shapes akin to the ethereal formations seen in the Mojave Desert. With seemingly unplanned and charismatic geometry these miniature prototypes provided the access into the multidimensional space, further enabling Kinsey to continue sharing his work with the wider audience through public sculpture projects.

Feeling somewhat stunted with painting as a medium and not fond of using the brush on canvas’ limiting format, the painterly practice over time transformed towards wall-type Relief sculptures. Taking the rock formations, landforms, as well as the migration of people as inspiration, Kinsey’s work began to break out of the square two-dimensional format and forcibly remove itself from figurative painting towards a more formalist structure. Starting from the notion that understanding and learning about nature leads to understanding and learning about ourselves in a greater, cosmic picture, these pieces are not meant to be understood rationally but rather require a letting go of past constructs and opening up to the unknown. As the monuments for the grandeur of the change, the Relief works prompted the artist to pull the sculpture back into the painting and tap into a physical, hands-on approach to art-making. Both the arduous wood processing and the non-forgiving coating or painting aspects were developed in an effort to capture the energy that moves everything with an object made from the residues of that movement. Such sculpturesque, even architectural approach has been utilized to this date, stripping, or elaborating the subject of the human condition to tactile metaphors of our interaction with the natural landscape. Evoking a higher sense of the consciousness-like experience in the vein of architectural mysticism, the layering element evolved from Kinsey’s early practice of using found materials in the street artwork or collaging paper or wood pieces into his paintings. This important shift in his process marked a significant move to close the relationship between his outdoor sculptures and his paintings.

Currently working on multiple bodies of works—outdoor sculpture, relief works, and paintings—Kinsey continues to develop ways to experience and convey the dynamic beauty of life through an absolute stillness as part of the ongoing exploration to better understand and interpret the world around him.

- Saša Bogojev

D Kinsey (b. 1971, Pittsburgh PA), has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries including ONEROOM Gallery, London; New Release Gallery, New York; ICA San Diego (formally LUX Art Institute), Encinitas, CA; Library Street Collective, Detroit; Jules Maeght Gallery, San Francisco; Die Kunstagentin, Cologne, Germany; Alice Gallery, Belgium; Joshua Liner Gallery, New York. His works are in the collections of Takashi Murakami, The Penny and Russell Fortune Collection in Indianapolis, Indiana, The Maeght Foundation in St. Paul-de-Vence, France, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and The Dean Collection in New York.