Kyle Utter
Grant awarded Fall 2017
I received a KPF travel grant and traveled from Rome to Wurzburg, Germany in summer 2018. From frescoes in Pompeii to Neo Rauch’s paintings in Bavaria, I was essentially able to retrace the development of western representational painting. Making stops to see frescoes by Giotto, Piero, murals by Ghirlandaio and Tiepolo I relived the development of European pictorial conventions. The Ludovisi family let me in their private residence to see the only fresco Carravagio painted in-situ. The amount and quality of painting I saw in Europe moved me to make paintings featuring human figures, which I hadn’t done in 9 years. As I came back from Europe to enter my last semester in Hunter’s MFA program and create my thesis exhibition, I entered a state of prodigious production, creating an outpouring of drawings and paintings which culminated in a thesis exhibition that displayed a new and inspired body of work. Sometimes words do not suffice in explaining the experience of looking at or making paintings, so it is difficult for me to explain the importance of the experience I had in Europe and the work it inspired. However, I will say it was a transformative experience. I feel the work I presented for my thesis exhibition was physical evidence of enormous growth, which wouldn’t have been possible without the KPF travel grant.
