Kahlil Robert Irving
EF3+E40, Sep 5 – Oct 18, 2025

CANADA is excited to announce EF3+E40, a one-person exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Kahlil Robert Irving. The show follows major museum exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kemper Art Museum. This is the first exhibition of Irving’s work in New York in three years.

Irving blurs the line between the natural world, built environments and the digital landscape. The work features contorted handmade replicas of everyday objects along with photographic depictions of rocks, gravel, bark, and the flowers that he encounters near his studio. The weathered brick buildings that dominate his home city of St. Louis are also often featured. Irving looks up and down; the sky and sidewalk are equal to him. The pieces in this presentation were begun in 2023 and are made through a labor-intensive set of techniques that include building the ceramic sculptures then painstakingly applying and reapplying enamel that emulates the radiance of plastic, paint, and glaze. The works are fired multiple times (up to 20 to 30 firings each). The works take on the aura of entropy and rebirth through the process of making.

Irving mines a digital archive that he has been amassing since 2012, editing and remixing images that he knits together to create collage-like paintings or applying them to his ceramics via an ingenious image transfer technology using ceramic toner. The hand-crafted nature of the work gives the objects a sense of simulacrum and transformation. According to Irving, “my ceramic sculptures engage in a kind of slow photography, using the kiln as an exposure unit transforming wet malleable clay into ceramic… it is a kind of deep time”. The sculptures look like fused chunks of colorful detritus, as if they were formed in outer space or a house fire. Text from newspapers and menthol cigarette packs, polished silver pitchers, 5-liter soda bottles, and keepsake porcelain dishes are reproduced and altered, becoming melty elegies of everyday life. The form and boundaries of the work is determined by the making process, not a predetermined sense of geometry, electronic screen or any format besides the essential parameters each piece demands. The intimacy Irving achieves is surpassed only by the strangeness that the works evince.

The paintings are large in scale and are drawn from images from the physical and online realities. Irving’s vision is one of hybridity, deliberately disrupting the line between the virtual and real. Building a practice that oscillates between multiple worlds of information, Irving uses material translation to negotiate multiple levels of consciousness, making a present that is resonant with attention-addled times. The effect of the paintings is immersive; the work crackles with grey energy that feels as if it could have emanated from a screen. They quote things Irving sees every day, advertisements from corner stores, the way streets and sidewalks degrade and how nature asserts itself in the urban environment.

Like Gordon Matta-Clark, Irving uncovers systems seen and unseen, both societal and natural, in order to liberate and reimagine the world. Irving’s list of inspirations is varied; the unloved sediment of the internet, the bricks and brick architecture of St. Louis, Aretha Franklin carrying the Olympic torch in the 2002 Olympics, and the TV show “The Wire”. His sense of place and the importance of rootedness is apparent in the recognizable things he quotes and transforms throughout his practice. His combinations become candy-colored heaps of melancholia that refer to social realities, relationships, the urban landscape and the histories that Irving investigates and lives.

Kahlil Robert Irving (b. 1992, San Diego, California) lives and works in St. Louis Missouri. He attended the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University, in St. Louis (MFA Fellow, 2017) and the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA, Art History and Ceramics, 2015). In December 2021 Irving opened his first museum solo exhibition - Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving at the Museum of Modern Art. Irving recently participated in Social Abstraction at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and Hong Kong. He has also participated in the Singapore Biennale, Singapore; Soft Water Hard Stone; The New Museum Triennial; and Making Knowing: Craft in Art from 1950 to 2019 at the Whitney Museum of Art. Works by Irving have been included in group exhibitions at the Abrons Art Center, New York; The Anderson Collection at Stanford University, San Francisco; and Mass MOCA, North Adams. He was an Artist in Residence at Art Omi in summer 2018. Also, he was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2019, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2020, the Young Artist Prize in 2023 and the prestigious US Artist Fellowship in Visual Art for 2025.

In 2023 to 2024, Irving’s work has been subject to several solo exhibitions including presentations at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; and concurrently at the Kemper Art Museum in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Irving’s work is in the collections of the Ken Ferguson Teaching Collection at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri; J.P Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, New York; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; the Riga Porcelain Museum, Latvia; the Foundation for Contemporary Ceramic Art, Kecskemet, Hungary; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.

Click here to view Kahlil Robert Irving's CV.