Three years ago artist Kevin Sloan was approached by Lisa M.W. Eldred, the director of exhibitions at Denver Botanic Gardens, with an offer to create a show for the new gallery they were building. Sloan was interested in the project, and the pair continued talks as the construction on the Freyer-Newman Center for Science, Art and Education progressed from its groundbreaking in May 2018. The building was complete in spring 2020, but because of the pandemic, has slowly been opening its spaces. Sloan’s exhibition was scheduled and about a year prior he began working on the site-specific paintings.
His artwork has always focused on nature, but with this series of paintings he used the gardens and the gallery space as inspiration. “I painted this group of works to be specifically seen together as a family of paintings. A lot of the images within the paintings are reflected from one work to another. For instance, there’s a small painting, 24 by 24 inches, of a single sunflower and a much larger one that is full of sunflowers. It’s this giant plant,” says Sloan. “This venue interested me greatly as an atypical art venue because the primary reason to go to the Denver Botanic Gardens is to see the gorgeous gardens and plant life, and I didn’t want to pretend that didn’t exist. It does exist and I wanted to echo that quality of the natural world in my work.”
This story is from the Brilliant Blooms edition of American Art Collector.
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This story is from the Brilliant Blooms edition of American Art Collector.
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