London-based painter Kim Neudorf works from a loosely autobiographical archive of texts, images, and studio research. These materials don’t appear directly in the finished paintings, but they act as a quiet, sustaining presence—sources engaged in close ongoing conversation as the work develops.
For Neudorf, the exhibition title real_real—the word “real” doubled, in lower case, joined by an underscore—signals openness rather than a single fixed idea or meaning. He links this approach to catachresis, a literary device, meaning “misuse” in Greek, where through exaggeration, repetition, and mixed metaphors, language expresses new forms that resist neat definition.
Collage often initiates Neudorf’s material and formal process. By assembling fragments of imagery, he considers how experience and identity can be expressed through multiplicity. As a queer and transmasculine artist, this method becomes a way for him to push back against narrow expectations of how queerness and transness are often expected to be represented. His paintings—both visually and conceptually—refuse the idea that art or artists must conform to binary standards of legibility.
Neudorf’s works embrace tension, intuition, and experimentation. They honour lived experiences that assert difference. In his words, the paintings—including many new canvases—aim to acknowledge “more complicated modes of visibility and existence.”
About the artist:
Kim Neudorf completed his BFA from Alberta University of the Arts in 2005 and his MFA from Western University in 2012. A past semi-finalist in the 13th RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2011, his work has appeared most recently at The Next Contemporary, Franz Kaka, Paul Petro, and Susan Hobbs galleries in Toronto; Harkawik, New York City; Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston; Thames Art Gallery, Chatham; and at Support, DNA Gallery, Forest City Gallery, and Embassy Cultural House in London, Ontario. Neudorf is a sessional instructor in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University.
