Kurt Kauper is a painter whose work had, for the past fifteen years, been images of familiar cultural icons—opera divas, Cary Grant, hockey players, and Barack and Michelle Obama—seen in a variety of unfamiliar ways. His figure paintings of historical and imagined people tend to leave expectations unfulfilled, and elide simple categorisation. In contradistinction to his clear and precise articulations of form, Kauper's content is characterised by indeterminacy, unintentionality, ambiguity, fluidity, destabilisation, strangeness, amorality, uselessness, and the neutral. He loves Bach, Ingres, and Roland Barthes.
