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.”

Kinsey’s work navigates existential themes through abstraction and representation, often operating in tandem. Emerging from street culture and design in the 1990s, his trajectory shifted after relocating to the Sierra Nevada mountains in California in 2010, when he shuttered his design studio and gallery BLK/MRKT in favor of immersing himself in a natural environment to focus on his personal work. This transition profoundly altered his visual vocabulary, moving from his signature linear figuration toward totemic, surrealist structures that situate the human presence within a broader natural and psychological field. This five-year period became a crucial stage in setting the tone for what would evolve over the following decade.

Out of this evolution emerged a body of work built on enigmatic metaphors, contorted forms, and color used to convey narrative—elements that address our relationship with nature and contemporary human existence. This is also evident in Kinsey’s most recent series, “Existential Synthesis”, which considers the paradox of contemporary comfort—spaces of artificial stability constructed amid escalating ecological and societal pressure. The paintings merge anthropomorphic forms and environments into compressed, surreal fields that oscillate between shelter and collapse. Kinsey frames painting as a space where images become a carrier of tension and reflection.

Kinsey (b. 1971, Pittsburgh PA), has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries including; Oolong Gallery, San Diego; 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.