Artist Gabriel Krekk's light-drenched photorealist watercolors belie the notion that contemporary painting must fall within an expressionist tradition. Instead, Krekk's work in photorealism reveals that an unmediated objective image is impossible; his skill lies in embracing that sobering truth while also allowing his humanism to come through.

To paint a "mundane" object in the photorealist style is to see the object anew in ways not even possible through the original medium of photography. Krekk also brilliantly appropriates photography's imperfections--the globes of light which appear on a lens, and the unfocused backgrounds--and transfers them to the canvas, thereby raising philosophical and aesthetic questions about the intervention of technology (and the artist) in the creation of truth and beauty. Look at these works for both the visual pleasure and the humor, for Gabriel Krekk's stunning watercolors please the eye and stimulate the mind, while being benignly and ironically subversive to the status quo