b. Virginia, MN, US
Lives and works in New York, NY, US
Kyle Staver is an American painter who also works in relief sculpture, drawing, and etching. Engaging with canonical Western mythological and folkloric traditions, Staver finds her inspiration in sources ranging from the Bible to ancient Greek oral-poetic traditions. Staver captures critical moments within these narratives in her fastidiously refined color palettes, identifiable for their stark highlights and rich use of darker tones which blanket figures and their environments in shadow. Despite working with stories that have been re-told throughout centuries, Staver cultivates an enigmatic atmosphere within her paintings—both formally and narratively. As Dan Nadel put it in Artforum: “Her sources are the urtexts of patriarchy, but Staver often flips the script” to offer intelligent re-workings of gender dynamics enshrined in ancient archetypes. Her paintings traffic in a kind of narrative uncanny, as the stories to which they refer are simultaneously familiar and new or unsettling.
Kyle Staver (b. Virginia, MN, US; lives and works in New York, NY, US) earned her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University. In 2015, she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, and in 2003, she was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. She has had solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels; Half Gallery, New York; Zürcher Gallery, New York; Galerie RX, Paris; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York; among many others. Her work is in the collections of the National Academy of Design (New York), The American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York), The National Arts Club (New York), The McEvoy Foundation (San Francisco), and Portland Community College (Portland, Oregon). Staver is also recognized as a distinguished member of the National Academy of New York.