George Billis Gallery | 1/1-3/31 | New York, NY

Impermanence & Simplicity

George Bills Gallery curates a pop-up show featuring the art of Kurt Solmssen.

By Alyssa M. Tidwell

When Kurt Solmssen was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the early 1980s, he had a Toyota pick-up. The largest canvas that would fit in the bed of the truck was 50 by 70 inches, which became the standard size for his big paintings. The artist would drive around Manayunk, an area of Philadelphia that resembled a European city, with houses and churches above the Schuylkill river, or across the river in Belmont Hills, looking for places where he could set up and paint.

Wabi Sabi (diptych), 2025, oil, 52 x 98 in.

“I was attracted to images where the shapes and colors, and the light and shadow, somehow fit together like pieces of a puzzle,” Solmssen says. The artist creates painterly scenes of the outdoors, maritime subjects and interiors.

Starting on New Year’s Day, George Billis Gallery is curating a pop-up show for Solmssen in a historic building in New York City's meat packing district next to the High Line and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Among the recent works in the show is Wabi Sabi, a diptych depicting a backyard garden on a bright, sunny day.

Lauren in the Sun, 2025, oil, 68 x 66 in.

“I recently read a book about the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi. It is about the impermanence of things. It sees beauty in imperfection. I had put up a fence to keep our large population of deer from eating everything in the garden. One deer was able to jump over the 7-foot-high fence. I needed to make the fence taller but didn’t want to spend a lot of time doing it. I wanted to spend time on the paintings that I was working on, not on fence building. So, I took some [planks] from the studio and tacked it onto the top of the fence posts and added chicken wire, not worrying about everything being perfect…As I was painting in the thin pieces of wood that run across the foreground of the painting…I thought that the title of the painting should be Wabi Sabi.”

Rocky Bay, September 7 AM, oil, 36 x 40 in.

Solmssen describes his style as “painterly realism,” deeply influenced by all the great paintings that surrounded him during his time at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He also cites the San Francisco Bay Area figure painters as another major source of inspiration.

“In recent years, the subject of my paintings has been about the light as much as the figures in the space.” he says. “I often work on the space first, the shapes of light and shadow in the room, and then put the figures into that space. I may paint figures in, and then take them out, until the composition works.”