"Kevin Fuermann: The Waiting Room"
2000-05-13 until 2000-08-31
Sharon Truax Fine Art, A Meta-Arts Space
Venice, CA, USA United States of America

The Waiting Room began in France and was completed in southern California where the artist currently resides. Fuermann has been exploring the chair as a symbol of the human figure after working with the physically challenged for two years some twenty years ago. It was then that his first wheel chair painting made its appearance.

In the mid 1990's, during a period when the Fuermann felt increasingly imprisoned by life in ways he could not escape - social breakdown, loss of faith, loss of hope, and finally catastrophic loss of health - the chair re-emerged as a metaphor for the artist's own struggle. After reading a quotation from T.S. Eliot's, East Coker, the idea for The Waiting Room came: chairs pinned into place, lodged within a closed space, forced to accept the waiting. Over the five-year period in which the current body of work evolved, Fuermann explored this theme as his own situation evolved. With the most recent chair paintings, and the completion of the body of work, the chairs appear to disintegrate, a kind of breaking out.

The Passage from T.S. Eliot's East Coker, captures The Waiting Room.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; There is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Kevin Fuermann, born in Evanston, Illinois, attended the Art Institute of Chicago and received his BFA from the University of Illinois. He has lived and painted in France and Italy. This is the second year that Fuermann's paintings have been selected for the Venice Art Walk exhibition featured at Sharon Truax Fine Art, a Meta-Arts space for conscious Being in art and prayer.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of California

Other Important Exhibitions in California