12.13: Infinite Regress

The exhibit prompting the visit to Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is called Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond. It is on view through February 23, 2025.

infinite regress : an endless chain of reasoning leading backward by interpolating a third entity between any two entities

Here are a few works that caught my eye.

Scale is so hard to convey, but these are all fairly large pieces. Some of them — Dzubas’ 17 canvases — are VERY large. I kept trying to imagine the dimensions of the room in a house (rather than a museum) where that would work.

AND, did you catch that Dzubas was 70 +/- years old when he did that? I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised, given that my own artist husband did a 25′ long canvas when he was 75 +/-.

Age is an issue of mind over matter.
–Mark Twain

Stezaker (above) and Thiebaud & Katz (below) were also doing amazing work in later years.

It takes a very long time to become young.
–Pablo Picasso

Here are a few other pieces, not part of the main exhibition, that also caught my eye.

I love a Thiebaud dessert painting! They’re so colorful & fun.

This painting is also quite large — I kept the electrical receptacle in the frame for a bit of scale. It’s so big & the blacks are SO black… it took a minute to get pulled in.

Oh, I do love a long, horizontal painting. This piece is about a foot high & almost five feet long. It’s very detailed and appears to have been altered (something added or deleted) at some point, given the seam about a foot in from the right.

It was a fun & very fast trip — a Kansas City primer, if you will — and we will definitely go back! There are a lot more museums to visit… and barbecue to eat!