Painter Keer Tanchak is known for dreamy, feminine images that draw from the girlier side of pop culture (an astute viewer will spot references ranging from Poor Things to fashion tear sheets). But with her newest collection of work, she has expanded her vision beyond heroines from the reality show Love Island and lissome models to include portraits of domestic environments sourced from design magazines she has collected for over 20 years.
Most of the lucky 13 paintings in her new show, “Open, Close, Love, Repeat,” at Gallery 12.26, offer a peripheral, blurry perspective of luxurious kitchens, bedrooms and drawing rooms.
“In the past, there was always the inclination to repeat imagery to exhume the true subject,” Tanchak says of her move into dream homes. “Specifically, I looked to art history, film and design, and also things from television — or even dogs! I’m preoccupied with how the subjects ignite my energy. Is my eye interested in looking at it? And then ultimately, how will the translation make an interesting painting.”
Indeed, her rooms are at once familiar and surreal, prompting viewers to imagine the lives of those who reside in them. Having shown in the past few years at Secrist/Beach in Chicago, JDJ Gallery in New York and the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas, the Dallas-based artist is coming home with “Open, Close, Love, Repeat,” her first local show since 2022.
And her “hug-sized” paintings that embody the juxtaposition between the impractical, non-luxurious feel of the aluminum sheets she paints them on and the luxurious rooms she portrays are a luscious, tense return to enigmatic form.
“I don’t live in any of these spaces,” she says. “But each one of them has its own history and I absorb it as my own personal narrative.”
Details
The grand opening of Keer Tanchak’s “Open, Close, Love, Repeat” and Gal Shindler’s “Between Two Waters” is June 28 from 2 to 5 p.m. at Gallery 12.26, 150 Manufacturing St., Suite 205, Dallas.
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