Michael Kagan Lights Out
Michael Kagan Lights Out was a solo exhibition presented in 2017 at Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, featuring a new body of oil paintings that expanded Kagan’s exploration of human ambition, speed, and risk. The exhibition’s title—borrowed from the phrase signaling the start of a Formula One race—framed the work’s focus on anticipation, momentum, and the decisive moments that precede action.
Kagan’s paintings depict astronauts, race car drivers, pilots, and extreme landscapes, subjects drawn from environments where human capability intersects with technological and natural forces. Cropped viewpoints and fragmented compositions place the viewer inside these charged scenes, while thick, gestural brushwork shifts between abstraction and representation, revealing form through distance and perception. This tension between clarity and chaos mirrors the psychological stakes embedded in the imagery.
Rather than celebrating triumph as a conclusion, Lights Out centers on moments of suspension—just before launch, impact, or loss of control—when possibility and danger coexist. Through this focus, the exhibition deepened Kagan’s investigation of iconic imagery and collective memory, positioning his work at the intersection of spectacle, introspection, and painterly inquiry.
Mercury 7, 2016 Oil on linen 96 x 96 in (243.8 x 243.8 cm)
There Is No End, 2015 Oil on linen 96 x 72 in (243.8 x 182.9 cm)
Concorde, 2015 Oil on linen 60 x 80 in (152.4 x 203.2 cm)
Global Player, 2016 Oil on linen 60 x 45 in (152.4 x 114.3 cm)
Lights Out, 2016 Oil on linen 24 x 24 in (61 x 61 cm)
The Month of May, 2016 Oil on linen 45 x 60 in (114.3 x 152.4 cm)