January at Arts on Douglas December 19 2025
NICHOLAS KALEMBA
The Question is the Answer
On Exhibit: January 3 - February 13, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 3, 4-7 PM
Artist Talk: Friday, February 13, 11 AM
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Image: Nicholas Kalemba, Pepper's Ghost of Main Character Syndrome, oil on canvas, 60 x 90 inches
About the Exhibition:
Nicholas Kalemba is a contemporary painter and educator known for his large-scale acrylic and oil paintings. His work comments on the uniquely American abundance of visual imagery and how it has shaped his autobiographical story. Drawing from news media, advertisements, memes, video games, art history, film, mythology, and everyday encounters, his paintings reflect the visual landscape of his daily surroundings.
For this exhibition, Kalemba presents a collection of recent work that continues to confront the overwhelming quantity and diversity of visual information consumed on a regular basis. He accomplishes this by creating paintings that combine, collage, and recontextualize seemingly disparate subject matter to “highlight how meaning is not static but constantly reshaped through context, usage, and interpretation.”
In his exhibition statement, Kalemba elaborates:
“When I consider this oversaturation of imagery, all the things that are traditionally valued in art-making, such as depth, coherence, originality, authenticity and meaning itself seem to be dissolved amid those empty swirls of imagery. Amidst this deluge of visuals, there lies an opportunity for introspection, innovation, redefinition, and debate.”
Kalemba’s paintings also engage with traditions of appropriation. Incorporating copyrighted media into his paintings is a deliberate strategy used to question and explore the nature of ownership in a visual culture. As the exhibition title suggests, his artwork offers more questions over answers, but it is Kalemba’s hope that “The presence of recognizable imagery prompts viewers to reflect on their own relationships to these images: how they consume them, what value they assign to them, and who is deemed to 'own' cultural expression in a digital, postmodern landscape.”
About the Artist:
Nicholas Kalemba (M.F.A., University of Central Florida) is a lecturer of Drawing and Painting at the University of Central Florida. Specializing in acrylic and oil painting, he works as a studio painter and muralist with his personal and commissioned work being exhibited nationally in public and private collections. His work has been exhibited in numerous group and juried exhibitions where he has won multiple awards and recognitions, including a two-year residency at the Maitland Arts and History Center from 2019-2021. His work grapples with dualities and contradictions, and often utilizes the formats of painted photomontage, collage or social realism to incorporate a wide array of iconography and imagery, while adding commentary through their juxtapositions.