JDJ is thrilled to present our debut solo exhibition with Canadian artist Shawn Kuruneru. The free-flowing, organic shapes within Kuruneru’s paintings on raw canvas have a rhythmic, almost musical presence.

Despite the fact that they look as though they were done by stencil due to their crisp edges, the forms are unplanned and improvised, free hand and free form.

The shapes are personal to his body—how far his arms can reach, the movement of his wrist, the control of his hand.

The lyrical play between positive and negative space is often at the heart of his paintings—both in the works that incorporate a fine-tuned and nuanced color palette, as well as the monochromatic works in the exhibition, which emphasize the relationship between positive and negative.

Kuruneru’s all-over compositions can find their historical lineage in European and American abstractionists, such as Carla Accardi, Lee Krasner, and Simon Hantai, among others, in which all parts of the canvas are treated with equal importance.

Kuruneru creates aqueous solutions of acrylic paint that function almost like watercolor, staining the raw canvas.

At times, the colors of adjacent forms bleed into one another in an organic burst, in satisfying contrast to the hard edges of their boundaries—a moment where he must surrender control and let the paint find its own path.

Kuruneru’s interest in incorporating soft washes of tonal color into the paintings is inspired by 20th century artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Lewis, as well the paint handling found in traditional Chinese mountain landscape paintings—a nod to his own heritage.

Shawn Kuruneru (b. 1984, Canada) lives and works in Montreal, Canada. Kuruneru’s work is in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, OR), The National Gallery of Canada Library Collection (Toronto, Canada), CELINE (Paris, France). Recent solo exhibitions include Cooper Cole (Toronto, Canada), KOKI ARTS (Tokyo, Japan), Sunny NY (New York, NY), Bozidar Brazda/GALLERY (Woodstock, NY) and group exhibitions include Skarstedt Gallery curated by David Salle (New York, NY), Mother Gallery (Beacon, NY), Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Ribordy Thetaz (Geneva, Switzerland), Rachel Uffner (New York, NY). Kuruneru collaborated with CELINE in 2019 on their Capsule Collection. His work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, Mousse Magazine, The Guardian and NY Arts Magazine, among others. Kuruneru currently has a large-scale work on view at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canada.