Kevin Larmon

Early life

Kevin Larmon was born in Syracuse, New York in 1955. He grew up on a small horse farm. Larmon's mother was a school secretary while his father was a construction worker. He graduated from Binghamton University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and moved to New York City as an undergraduate senior, where he finished his schooling at the New York Studio School. In the late 1970s, Larmon played guitar for Mudmen, a three piece band in the East Village of New York City with Craig Gillis playing bass, Mike Caffes playing drums, and percussionist Jill Burkhart. Mudmen played in venues such as CBGB, Danceteria, A7 (bar), Pyramid Club, Mudd Club, and The Limelight.

Artistic Practice

Larmon started making still life paintings in 1979. He has also worked with atmospheric drawings and paintings since 1989, many of which are made on canvas or wood. In 2009, he began to paint his cell paintings.

Larmon's paintings are built up through layers of collage and paint. Most famously, Larmon's work includes collages of gay male pornography that have been painted over with images that exist somewhere in between abstraction and form. These images are often anatomical. Conceptually, Larmon's work deals with issues such as the male body image and fascist culture. Similarly, Larmon's drawings on wood deal with ambiguously anatomical and abstracted forms.

His work has been associated with the post-conceptualism and neo-conceptual art movements, which were prominent aspects of exhibitions at Gallery Nature Morte and with Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo shaping the nature of painting after the rise of conceptual art. Larmon was also associated with Feature Inc., a gallery that was first established in Chicago in 1984. In August 1988, the gallery's director, known as Hudson, moved Feature Inc. to New York City. Larmon's first exhibition with Feature Inc. occurred in 1987 in Chicago, Illinois. Over the years, Hudson and Larmon would work together on many exhibitions.

Influences

As a young artist, Larmon spent his Thursdays working to sustain Gallery Nature Morte together with the gallery owners, Alan Becher and Peter Nagy, when the gallery existed in New York City. Larmon was heavily influenced by his contemporaries at Gallery Nature Morte such as Robin Weglinski, Joel Otterson, and Steven Parrino.

Other influential artists include Oliver Wasow, Robert Gober, Nancy Shaver, Carter Hodgkin, and Steven Wolfe. Larmon also drew inspiration from Rembrandt, Giorgio Morandi, Jackson Pollock, and Agnes Martin.

Early Shows

Larmon's first group exhibition, Choices, was presented at the Drawing Center in New York in 1979. In 1982, he exhibited in the New Drawing in America exhibition at the Drawing Center and at the inaugural exhibition of Gallery Nature Morte in New York.

1983–Present

Larmon participated in Aperto 86 at the 1986 Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy, where his paintings were exhibited at the Corderie at the Arsenal.

From 1983–2013, Larmon was invited to exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Feature Inc, New York, New York; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Visual Arts Museum, New York, New York; the Morris Museum, Morristown, New Jersey; Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, now the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado; Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, New Jersey; and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 2013, Larmon was included in a group show at the Leslie Sacks Gallery in Los Angeles, California alongside artists Christo, Jim Dine, Pablo Picasso, Chuck Close, Howard Hodgkin, Jasper Johns, Marino Marini, Henri Matisse, Karel Nel, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, and Sebastião Salgado.

Exhibitions curated by Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo

Exhibitions at Feature Inc.

Collections

Larmon's works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery in the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas; the Chase Manhattan Bank NA, New York, New York; the McCrory Corporation Collection; the Progressive Corporation Collection, Cleveland, Ohio; and the Prudential Insurance Company Collection.

Larmon's work titled "Hunter" sold at auction during Christie's 2005 "The House Sale" in New York.

Positive

Holland Cotter said Larmon's painting installation in The Cathedral Project was "the most cohesive part of the show, largely because it is concentrated in a small side chapel. Most of the pieces were executed on wood panels that belonged to another artist, Tom Brazelton, who died of AIDS last year. Together they serve as a memorial to him, and they add up to Mr. Larmon's best recent work."

Ken Johnson (art critic) claimed that Larmon's "stained, yellow-glazed canvases have a quality of Old Masterish romanticism."

Negative

Roberta Smith critiqued Larmon's work regarding size and style in 1989. "Kevin Larmon's paintings are getting larger and more ambitious, which they needed to do, but most are somewhat weaker for the effort. Increasing the size reduces the preciousness of these works, which is good, but venturing toward trompe l'oeil, as Mr. Larmon seems to be doing, is a mistake."