17 ARTISTS TAKE ON GENDER IDENTITY IN "ENGENDER" @ KOHN GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

By Sasha Bogojev

Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles recently announced their upcoming Fall exhibition, Engender, focusing on male and female gender classifications. Through works by seventeen contemporary artists the show will examine this timely topic attempting to revolutionizing the way we visualize conventional gender as exclusively male or female.

Using painting as their primary tool and voice of expression, the artist in Engender are deconstructing and rewriting conventional notions of personal identity through their work. Putting traditional and figurative abstraction as the foundation for more fluid and inclusive expressions of identity, these new view points are set from a variety of different cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds. The title of the show suggest the play with the various meanings of the words "generate” and “gender” and how contemporary interpretations of the topic can be produced based on different standpoints.The artists in Engender tread the line between traditional and figurative abstraction and include the likes of October 2016 cover artist Nicole Eisenman, Emily Mae Smith, Loie Hollowell, Hernan Bas, Firelei Baez, Christina Quarles, Tschabalala Self, and past featured artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn, among others.