Kocar's long-standing reputation as one of our area's most out-there
and over-the-top painters is based on a legacy of instantly recognizable imagery.
For a quarter of a century, his wide-eyed, banana-nosed and round-toothed
characters have played out a unique satire ofcontemporary life in America.
His work has been exhibited at the Cleveland museum of Art, and in galleries
in paris and New York. He is the subject of numerous articles and receipient of many prizes and awards.
by any standard, Kocar is one of Cleveland's true originals.

Douglas Max Utter
Lakewoodbuzz.com

By appealing to jocular visual instincts and reactions, the insightful visions of
George F. Kocar successfully bypass one level of conditioned response with another,
anesthetizing instilled modifications of interpretation with a lightharded wizardry
which opens consideration to more somber and consequential metaphor.
The values of delight in his scenes cheerfully equilibrate their circumstantial admonitions.

New Art International
pp. 50
2001-2002 edition

It's alien air that artist George F. Kocar breathes,
evidence being his Grand Guignol paintings that specialize in
political buffoonery and push the color wheel hard. Garish social satire is Kocar's bag, popular around the world with exhibitions in
New York, L.A., Paris and Tokyo. His illustrations have appeared in Esquire, The New York Times and even Psychology Today
(this is your analyst who looks like your mother who looks like Dick Nixon as a clown).
See a bunch of his work all together at Ashtabula Arts Center...

Amy Braken Sparks
Free TIMES
September 5, 2001

The midwest has produced some of our most eccentric artists, most notably the "Hairy Who" group of Chicago. Not to be outdone,
Cleveland has given us George F. Kocar, a much exhibited painter who constitutes a school unto himself.
George F. Kocar's large, zany figurative canvases depict contemporary life as a surreal carnival.
In "The Trial" the subject is the media circus and Kocar gives it a Kaftaesque treatment,
with a blindfolded judge and everyone else, including the jury, the press, and spectators
wearing novelty glasses with the funny noses attached.
In other paintings, Kocar parodies the biggest sacred cow of all: art itself.
"Running Bull" depicts a manic bovine painter in his studio squeezing a nude lady out of a tube of paint, while his tail dips into a nearby paint bucket.
The bull-artist, to employ the term that springs most immediately to mind,
has a single cyclops eye with two pupils and the entire picture is an irreverent take-off on Picasso.
Equally zany is Kocar's "Mad about Vince," which depicts a rabid van Gogh fan wearing a straw hat, sunflower sunglasses, and a van Gogh self-portrait t-shirt,
sitting next to a window that looks out on a van Gogh landscape. the canvas is an over-the-top parody-cum-tribute painted in an amplified post-Impressionist manner.
Maria R. Pagano
GALLERY & STUDIO
Spring/Summer 2000

High Energy Paintings

George Kocar reveals the world's problems with hilarious originality and intuition.
A kind of "funky" modern day Goya, he creates paintings reminiscent of Caprices.
While Goya emphasized the greed and corruption of the Church and man's hypocracies,
Kocar satirizes the weaknesses of contemporary society...
Bright colors, childlike forms, and repeated patterns culminate in humorous whimsicle images.
Cecily Barth Firestein
MANHATTAN ARTS INTERNATIONAL
September-October 1993


...with exuberant brush strokes...he paints the impressions of the comedie humaine and bizarre figures representing Everyman...
...Kocar is testing new ground in terms of process; he is commited to paint as he is to content.
Steven Heller
The New Humorists
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