Elsewhere

Elsewhere

Caleb Kortokrax

It is this subtle distance between presence and inward departure that the work returns to again and again.

Across the exhibition, Kortokrax explores divided attention, the mind wandering while the body remains. These paintings are about the inner world, a place no viewer can enter. Consciousness drifts beyond the immediate into a veiled distance, and childhood moves through that threshold with particular ease. Here, sleep and daydream become thresholds where the unseen becomes the spirit of the image.

Kortokrax approaches these scenes with openness to the everyday while eschewing sentimentality. The paintings preserve solitude, allowing their subjects to remain partially unreachable. They offer not narrative but atmosphere, an invitation to linger over a gaze, a posture, a moment of stillness.

The exhibition title, Elsewhere, names a central human capacity: an inward departure that requires no movement at all, the mind’s ability to slip away.

Biography

Caleb Kortokrax (b. 1987) received his MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. His work links historical painting languages to the present through a representational practice grounded in observation and color. He has had solo exhibitions at C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD), St. Charles Projects (Baltimore, MD), Kristin Michelle Mason Gallery at Beacon College (Leesburg, FL), De Pree Art Gallery at Hope College (Holland, MI), and Greenspring Gallery at Stevenson University (Stevenson, MD). He has exhibited in group exhibitions at Sideshow Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), AUTOMAT Collective at the Crane Arts Building (Philadelphia, PA), Longwood Center for the Visual Arts (Farmville, VA), and the Mitchell Gallery at St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD). His work has been featured in New American Paintings (Nos. 136 and 148). He was featured on the cover of Dappled Things (Candlemas 2024, Vol. 19, Issue 1). Kortokrax received 3rd Place in the Bethesda Painting Awards in 2018 and was a semifinalist in 2013. He was the 2018 Borgeson Artist in Residence at Hope College (Holland, MI), the 2019 Monson Arts Resident (Monson, ME), and Artist in Residence at Mount Calvary Catholic Community (Baltimore, MD) from 2020–2023.