Since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s, Brian Maguire has approached painting as an act of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity’s violence against itself, and the potential for justice. Maguire’s preoccupations draw him to the margins of the art world—alternative space, prisons, women’s shelters, and psychiatric institutions—making shows in traditional gallery and museum spaces something of a rarity. Maguire’s most recent paintings directly confront issues of migration, displacement and human dignity in the face of the current global unrest. They are some of his most nuanced and ambitious to date, which he has crafted with larger brushes and thinned-down acrylic on canvas. He works slowly, using photographic sources, searching for that point where illustration ceases and art begins. This growing contrast between the seductive painterly aesthetic and the subject matter only adds to the potential impact of these formidable canvases.
Solo exhibitions include: Rhona Hoffmann Gallery, Chicago, USA (January 2021); War Changes It’s Address, American University Musuem, Washington DC, and United Nations Headquarters, New York, USA (both 2020); Scenes of Absence, Rubin Center, Texas University, USA (2019); Escenarios de ausencia, Art Museum Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (2019); War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2018); Concerned, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2018) and the European Parliament, Brussels (2012). Recent group exhibitions include: Naked Truth, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2018); Demise, Cleveland University Art Gallery, Cleveland, OH, USA (2018); The sea is the limit, York Art Gallery, UK (2016); Conversations, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014) and Ni Una Mas, Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA (2010).
Erin Lawlor (b. 1969 in Epping, England) received her Bachelor of History of Art in 1992 from Paris-Sorbonne University, France.
She has had numerous solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include “entre chien et loup” at Luca Tommasi in Milan (2021), “Memory of a Free Festival”, at Fox/Jensen/McCrory Gallery, Auckland (2020); “Erin Lawlor” at Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC (2019); “cat on the raz,” Espacio Valverde, Madrid; “hiraeth,” Fox/Jensen Gallery, Sydney; “here to the hidden hills,” Fifi Projects, San Pedro, Mexico (all 2018); “Erin Lawlor,” Rod Barton, Brussels (2016).
In 2017, a survey exhibition of Lawlor’s work, “onomatopoeia,” took place at the Rothko Center, Daugavpils, Latvia, and her work was showcased in “Maleri.Nu/Paint.Now,” at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2016.
Recent group exhibitions include “10” at PM/AM, London; “Holding Hands” at Union Gallery, London (both 2021); “Hallucinogenic” at Gerhard Hofland, Amsterdam (2020); “Wet, wet, wet: Erin Lawlor, Aida Tomescu, Liat Yossifor”, at Fox/Jensen/McCrory, Auckland; “British Painting 2019” at Space K, Seoul (2019); “A brief History of Abstraction,” Rønnebæksholm, Denmark; “L’Echappée Belle, Erin Lawlor/Bram van Velde,” Galerie Pauline Pavec, Paris, France (2018) (…)
Her work is present in numerous private collections. Public collections include the New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge, UK; the Mark Rothko Art Centre, Latvia; and corporate collections include Kolon Group Art Collection, Seoul and the Nordstrom collection, U.S.A.
Lawlor currently lives and works in London, UK.
She is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, and Fox/Jensen and Fox/Jensen/McCrory galleries, Sydney/Auckland, and Luca Tommasi, Milan.
Born in Gorey, County Wexford, Ireland, in 1953, Robert Armstrong lives and works in Dublin, and is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, also in Dublin. He is a Founder Member of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and was Head of Painting at the National College of Art & Design (NCAD) from 2002 until his retirement in 2018, having taught at the college since 1991. He has exhibited regularly in Ireland and abroad for more than forty years. His work is included in many private and public collections and has been the subject of essays by writers including Aidan Dunne, Declan Long and Colm Tóibín.
Selected exhibitions include Vision X, curated by Diana Copperwhite, RHA Gallery, Dublin. Participating artists include Norbert Schwontowski, Joyce Pensato, Thomas Nozkowski (2019); Water Mountain – Made in Hong Kong, (solo) AVA HKBU, Hong Kong (2019); Squeegee Paintings, (solo) Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin (2019); Slips and Glimpses, Robert Armstrong and Anna Bjerger, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (2016); VOLTA New York, Solo Presentation with Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (2015).
Eddie Kennedy was born in North Tipperary in 1960 and now lives in Dublin. First exhibiting at the Independent Artists Exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1982, he graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design with a Distinction in Painting in 1983. He was awarded a full scholarship by the University of Cincinnati, where he received a Masters in Fine Art Painting in 1989. Subsequently, Kennedy spent a number of years in New York painting, exhibiting and working alongside established US artists. He has maintained a significant presence in the United States where he has shown with John Cacciola in Chelsea and at art fairs in LA, Miami and Chicago. Kennedy’s work has also been exhibited in the United Kingdom and Europe. Early solo shows in Ireland included the Tom Caldwell Gallery in Dublin and the Riverrun Gallery in Limerick. He returned home to Ireland with a solo show at Dublin’s Irish Life Exhibition Centre in 1996. Later Kennedy exhibited with the Paul Kane Gallery in Dublin and had solo shows at Éigse, Carlow (2000 and 2009) and was included in the Éigse, 30th anniversary exhibition (2010) at VISUAL, Carlow.
He has been the grateful recipient of awards from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation and TippFM. In 2017 he was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award. He was elected as a member of Aosdána in 2017. Publications on his work include Find (2007, ISBN: 978-0-9556736-0-3) and Thread (2012, ISBN: 978-0-9564950-9-9).
Kennedy has been represented by Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, since 2004.
Putting together two or more parts into an order is a narrative. Often when starting a painting I have a specific sequence in mind, a self-righteous one with clearly identifiable assignations to the parts. Presuming that the baseline purpose of all critical activity is to unmake and/or complexify a preexisting order, mine is to both answer the urge to express my particular narrative, and to hope for its undoing.
My work is as much a monitoring of my uses and abuses of really primitive psychoanalytic models as it is an articulation of them. I know letting obsolete thought regimes go is the price I pay for cognitive realignment. In periods I have painted towards the comfort and confirmation of what I already know – this always fails – and in stronger times towards upending it. Which imperatives are open for analytic adjustment and which ones are temperamental are not always clear to me.
My work is a narrative retrofitted to the resistance, tempo and mess of paint. Distinctions blur, categories bleed and pollute each other and uncover multiple complicities in their painted incarnations. The material evidence of this process is the doubleness I experience when in front of a painting: the phenomenological excess. This never-perfect-fit between image and its container is both my reward and irritant.
Like everyone else, I struggle with painting’s relevance; I place the point of my continued use of it on its limitations.
Painting’s analogy to skin isn’t new: the painted surface is a hide where battle-scars remain as a record of its experiences. The privacy of painting makes the analogy even easier: I stroke, lick, brush, bathe, in its unmaking I sand and cut. I am drawn to the dumb puns and double entendres of the body, the creases that stand in for other creases, apertures that open in place of other apertures, infantile behaviors that return as adult ones, etc.: thought games that make the intolerable tolerable. In paint I am looking at a viscous flourish that reminds me of something else, but is potent enough to keep me from naming that other thing –.
If consciousness knows itself through (painted) language, it is by mining painting for its systemic/grammatical failures that I can hope to find unexpected outcomes to my narrative. I want to pry the subject away from its infatuation with fluency.
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Currently a full professor at Mason Gross School of the Art, Røgeberg previously taught at University of Washington, Cooper Union and Yale School of Art, and was a visiting artist at Skowhegan in 2009.
Jennifer Samet, Ph.D., is a New York-based art historian, curator, and writer. She is a professor of Art History at the City University of New York and co-directs the gallery Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in downtown Manhattan. She completed her dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center on Painterly Representation in New York: 1945-1975. She has lectured at universities across the country on the subject of “The Role of Empathy in Art.” Her writing on both abstract and representational painting has been published in Master Drawings, Hyperallergic, ArtNet Magazine, the New York Sun, and numerous exhibition catalogs. She curated major historical exhibitions on The Jane Street Group, the history of the New York Studio School, and “Reconfiguring the New York School.” She is particularly interested in the voice of the artist, and has published many interviews with painters.
Lodestar | Ireland 2019
Thank you for your interest in Lodestar School of Art. We are currently accepting applications for the Work Study position for 2019.
Lodestar | Ireland 2019 is a 10-day painting and drawing intensive held at Glenstal Abbey and Castle, Murroe, County Limerick in the West of Ireland, from 4-16 August. This year’s guest faculty are internationally recognised artists from Europe and the U.S., including artists, critics and academics Glenn Goldberg, Alice Maher, Judy Glantzman, Sharon Horvath, John Yau, Chuck Webster, and Denis Farrell, plus other distinguished guests. The course promises to be both rigorous and rewarding.
The Role
We have one Work/Study position for an individual who is willing to help with light administrative work, social media, driving, act as a liaison between students and staff, and other, very minimal adhoc support to the Director and School Coordinator. The bulk of the support will be required in the first two days of the course, and the last day. The remaining time is yours to spend working as a student artist.
Essential Requirements
Must first be admitted to the course through the normal application process
Be a proficient multi-tasker and a team player with a positive, can-do attitude
Possess a full, clean driver’s license (and ability to drive in Ireland)
Access to a car
Fluent in English
In Exchange
In exchange for the support required the Course Fees are reduced to €1,500.
To Apply
Please first apply to the course (http://lodestarschoolofart.com/#apply)
Include a short cover letter indicating you are interested in also applying for the Work/Study position
Include a CV with your application materials
Questions?
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
Connie Farrell, Course Coordinator
connie.farrell@lodestarschoolofart.com
+353(0)877669622
Sharon Horvath is represented by the Drawing Room Gallery in East Hampton, New York and the Merola Gallery in Provincetown, MA and is an Academician of the National academy Museum and School. She has received numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, including a Fulbright Research Fellowship to India in 2013-14. Other awards include a Certificate of Honor from Tyler School of Art Alumni Association, the Anonymous Was a Woman Grant for Painting and a Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum in New York City . Horvath received the Richard C. Von Hess Award for excellence as a teacher and mentor from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, where she taught for five years. She received two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants and the Rome Prize Fellowship for painting by the American Academy in Rome. She was a Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation “space program” resident. She received an NEA Regional Grant (Mid-Atlantic) and an Elizabeth Foundation Grant for Painting. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Prize as well as a Purchase Award for the Utah Museum of Fine Art. Horvath’s first grant was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Painting. She was also a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Horvath received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York City and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia and Temple Abroad in Rome. She was awarded a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Scholarship by the Tyler School of Art. Since 1987, Horvath has shown her paintings and drawings in solo exhibitions in New York at Lori Bookstein Fine Art and Tibor De Nagy, Philadelphia, Boston, Provincetown and internationally and is represented in numerous public and private collections.
Horvath is also a Professor of Painting and Drawing, School of Art & Design at SUNY Purchase.
Dannielle Tegeder was born in Peekskill, NY. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and maintains a studio at The Elizabeth Foundation in Manhattan. She received her BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from The Art Institute of Chicago. Tegeder’s work employs strategies connected to Post-Minimalism and Twentieth-Century abstraction, often utilising mathematical, architectural or demographic data to produce an ever-evolving visual vocabulary. Her work is influenced by the mechanical drawings she observed as a child growing up in a family of steamfitters.
For the past ten years, Tegeder’s work has explored abstraction and architecture. While the core of her work is paintings and drawings, she has expanded her practice to large-scale installation, sculptural objects, sound, and animation. Her work has been presented in over 100 gallery exhibitions, both nationally and internationally in Paris, Houston, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, and New York. Tegeder has participated in numerous institution exhibitions including PS1/MOMA, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Several of her works are in the Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and The Weatherspoon Museum of Art in Greensboro, NC.
Tegeder is the recipient of several residencies and grants including The Yaddo Foundation, The Triangle Foundation Residency and Workshop, Elizabeth Foundation in New York, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Studio Residency at Governor’s Island, Smack Mellon Studios and Artist Stipend, Banff Centre for the Arts, Artist Residency in Banff, Canada, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Lower East Side Print Fellowship Edition Award, National Studio Program, P.S.1/MOMA Affiliate, Clocktower, New York, NY, ART OMI, Omi International Arts Center, Omi, NY, Henry Street Settlement Studio Fellowship, NY, and The Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Fellowship, NY.
Tegeder has recently exhibited at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Augeo Art Space in Rimini Italy, and National Gallery in Washington D.C. She has upcoming exhibitions at the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago, and the Frist Museum in Nashville.
Diana Copperwhite studied Fine Art Painting at Limerick School of Art and Design and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She completed an MFA at Winchestor School of Art, Barcelona in 2000. Diana is a tutor at the National College of Art and Design,Dublin. Her work is in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Arts Council of Ireland, and also in collections in the United States, Europe and Australia.
Diana Copperwhite, born 1969 in Limerick, studied at the Limerick School of Art and Design from 1987-92, received a BA in painting at the National college of Art and Design, Dublin and went on to do an MFA at the Winchester School of Art and Design, Barcelona.
Copperwhite is engaged with a sustained conceptual exploration of memory and abstraction. Using identifiable subjects, and sometimes drawing on media images, she plays with light and colour to create slightly unreal dreamlike and transitory compositions. The mood of her work is generally lyrical, creating an air of ambiguity of memories transformed in the unceasing passage of time. In a most unique capacity, she works over recognizable l images, working and reworking their surface and adding rich layers, so that objects are transported in an entirely new direction into a fluid visual quality of being remembered, actually reimagined in the most singular vibrant ways.
She has exhibited extensively in Ireland, including solo presentations of her work at Royal Hibernian Academy, Limerick City Art Gallery, West Cork Arts Centre, Highlanes Municipal Gallery, and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. Her overseas exhibitions include Purdy Hicks Gallery, London, and Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, France – in conjunction with the AIB Prize. In 2013 she started showing in New York and Miami with Thomas Jaeckel.
In 2012 she was a resident artist at the Josef Albers Foundation Connecticut, USA. She was a finalist in the Guasch Coranty Fundacio Painting Prize, Centre Cultural Metropolita Tecia Sala, Barcelona (2008) and was winner of the AIB Art Prize (2007). Her work is in public collections including: Irish Museum of Modern Art, Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Office of Public Works, Contemporary Irish Art Society, Mariehamn Stadbiblioteque, Aland, Finland. International Red Cross Netherlands, and private collections in the USA, Australia and Europe.
Judy Glantzman was born in Long Island, NY in 1956 and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978. She began exhibiting in the early 1980’s in the East Village art scene, at Civilian Warfare and Gracie Mansion. She followed with shows at BlumHelman and Hirschl & Adler Modern in the 1990’s and at Betty Cuningham Gallery for the past eight years. She had a 30 year retrospective at Dactyl Foundation in spring 2009. Glantzman was a Painting instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design and part of the drawing falculty at the New York Studio School. The artist’s work can be seen in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Art Museum, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY; the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; The Progressive Collection, Cleveland, OH; and the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, most notably the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 2001; the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Grant, 1997; the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, 1994; and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, 1992. Glantzman lives and works in New York, NY.
Helen O’Leary was born in County Wexford, Ireland, and studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin before coming to the United States to continue her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (B.F.A., 1987, M.F.A., 1989) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Penn State in 1991 and is currently a Professor of Art there.
She has participated in group exhibitions around the world, including at the National Gallery of Art in Limerick, Ireland; the Glasgow Museum of Art in Scotland; the Scott Pfaffman Gallery in New York City; the Galerie le Petit Port in Leiden, The Netherlands; the Contemporary Arts Centre in Sydney, Australia; and in Shanghai, China. The Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago; the Michael Gold Gallery in New York City; the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia; The Beverly Art Centre in Chicago; the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi, India; the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, and the Catherine Hammond Gallery in Cork, Ireland, are among the many venues that have mounted solo exhibitions of her work.
Helen O’Leary’s art has been honored with two Pollock-Krasner awards (1989, 1996) and a Joan Mitchell Award for painting and sculpture (2000); several grants from the Arts Council of Ireland; residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Monaghan, Ireland, and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Almeria, Spain; and most recently both the Culturel Irlandaise and Guggenheim fellowships. She has also been a visiting artist in Ireland, at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, GMT Galway, and the University of Limerick; in Scotland, at the University of Glasgow; in Australia, at Edith Cowen University in Perth and Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne; as well as at several universities in the United States.
Long interested in the relationship between language and literature and art, she will be spending her Guggenheim Fellowship term in New York, Paris, and Berlin where she hopes to further explore the texts and letters of Samuel Beckett and shape her material response to them.
MICHAEL DAVID was born in Reno, NV, grew up in Brooklyn, NY and earned his BFA from Parsons School of Design. His work is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenhiem, the Jewish Museum, NY, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. He is founder/director of Life on Mars Gallery, NY and co-founder of the new Hathaway David Contemporary in Atlanta, GA. David is classified as an abstract painter, best known for his use of the encaustic technique, which incorporates pigment with heated beeswax. He is also known for his works in mixedmedia figure painting, photography and environmental sculpture. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Edward Albee Foundations, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Alice Maher’s practice comprises many different media including drawing, sculpture, installation, print, photography, and more recently animation. In 2012 the Irish Museum of Modern Art presented a mid-career retrospective of her work. She is represented by Purdy Hicks Gallery London and Nolan Gallery in NYC. Maher has exhibited widely in Ireland, England and the United States, and represented Ireland in the 22nd Sao Paolo Biennale. The Irish Museum of Modern Art held a mid-career retrospective which charted her focus on materials in metamorphoses in 2012. In 2007 a large survey show of her work entitled Natural Artifice was held at the Brighton and Hove Museum. Also in that year she completed a major drawing installation The Night Garden for the RHA in Dublin. Orsola was an installation at the Oratorio di San Lodovico in Venice in 2006. The previous year she exhibited Rood at the Green on Red Gallery Dublin. Her Portraits were shown at the Purdy Hicks Gallery London in 2003. Gorget was the title of her exhibition at the David Nolan Gallery New York in 2000. Other solo shows include Knot at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery Dublin in 1999, Swimmers at Le Credac Centre d’Art, Ivry-sur-Seine in 1996 and ‘amiliar at the Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin in 1994. She lives and works in Ireland.
Denis Farrell was born in Ireland, and after graduating from Limerick School of Art Farrell started exhibiting his work at Taylor Galleries in Dublin. In 1989 Farrell attended the New York Studio School, and then received his MFA in Painting from Yale University School of Art in 1993. From 1994 until 1999 Farrell maintained studios in New Haven, Connecticut and in New York City while exhibiting in New York, Boston and Ireland. In 1997 Farrell founded Bingo Hall, a contemporary Art Space, in Williamsburg Brooklyn, to exhibit the work of a diverse group of international artists not represented by the commercial gallery system. The gallery was opened by Nan Annan, wife of Kofi Annan former Secretary General of the UN. In 1999 Farrell had his first museum show at Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2003, with catalog. In 2005 he was invited to exhibit at Irish Art Center in New York, and at The Dock Art Centre in Ireland in 2009. Farrell has received numerous awards, including a Fulbright scholarship for independent research, and grants from the Arts Council Ireland, and Culture Ireland. He has been teaching painting and drawing in Ireland at the Galway-Mayo and Sligo Institutes of Technology since 2000. In 2014 he founded Lodestar School of Art, a painting/drawing summer intensive. Farrell now divides his time between Aubepierre-sur-Aube in France and Ireland with his wife and two children.
John Yau has published books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Recent publications include Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P/Distributed Arts Publishers, 2008) and Exhibits (Letter Machine Editions, 2010). In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism. Yau has received many honors and awards for his work including a New York Foundation for the Arts award, the Jerome Shestack Award, and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France. Yau has taught at many institutions, including Pratt, the Maryland Institute College of Art, School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and the University of California-Berkeley. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail (2007-2011) before he began writing regularly for the online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend. He is a Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University).
Glenn Goldberg was born in the Bronx, NY, studied at the New York Studio School and received his MFA from Queens College. His work is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and LACMA, plus others. Goldberg has shown in New York, Boston, St Louis, and Munich, and is represented by Jason McCoy Gallery, NYC.
Goldberg creates luminous works made of delicate brushstrokes and flecks of color. His intricate designs seem to float off the surfaces and recall outsider art, Tantric drawings and stained glass. A recent series of paintings, each titled Wish, feature flowers with kaleidoscopic geometries of petals on subtly grayed backgrounds sprinkled with black dots. Goldberg’s paintings refer to anti-authoritarian attitudes of the 1970s that brought political and aesthetic movements such as feminist art and pattern painting to the forefront. He states that his paintings “attempt to facilitate the inexplicable.”
In his current exhibition, Of Leaves and Couds at FreedmanArt, NY the paintings bear Goldberg’s language of recognizable “dots” and transparent washes of color and grisaille. At once tactile and ephemeral, the “dots” articulate spaces that are both shallow and deep, alive, and unnervingly still. In a recent review, Roberta Smith said of Goldberg’s paintings: “He builds his images from infinitesimal dots that give the works an ambiguous, almost celestial ethereality and infuse his surfaces with an air of devotional quiet.” In this way, the marks not only construct pictorial space, but are a record of concentrated attention, time, and devotion. The earlier collages in the exhibition, created during an extended visit in Prato, Italy in 1989, utilize line and opacity in an intuitive and deliberate way. They are graphic in nature, though the hand is always felt. As in the recent works, they rely on layering (Goldberg has referenced making pictures “back to front”), and include ideas of the monumental, air, and privacy, within and across individual works.
In a statement for an exhibition at the Albany Museum of Art in 1989, then curator Peter Doroshenko wrote: “[The paintings blend] in a loose philosophical way various western iconography, dream sources, and Freudian imagery. Glenn Goldberg’s paintings contain many groupings, codes or “pools” of reference, molded intuitively from a multiplicity of sensibilities. In taking them out of their usual context and placing them in an environment that is unnatural, the works become both fictional and dramatic. Goldberg’s art flows from an immeasurable vacillation between the grand and the intimate… He does not make epic pictures to be worshipped, though each breathes deeply of the sublime.”
Chuck Webster is from Binghamton, New York, and was educated at Oberlin College, American University and Brooklyn. His work appears in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Baltimore Museum. He has shown in New York, Boston, Copenhagen, Cologne, London, Cincinnati and other locations.
“I work in paintings, drawings, collage and prints. I strive to make work that is clear, layered and generous. I want the pictures to be ordered in terms of scale, color, shape and surface. I am interested in an image that contains beautiful moments of material and engages the viewer on many levels. The images are drawn from personal history as well as from shapes and phenomena that I observe in the world. As a work gets going, the answers to its resolution appear often from a place inside the picture that could never have been anticipated from its outset.”
Roberta Smith of The New York Times, in her review of Webster’s 2012 solo exhibition, underscores the rigour behind the paintings. “Mr. Webster puts his motif through its paces, milking it for various associations, exploring different figure-ground relationships and adjusting paint handling, color and spatial depth, always guided by a generous, enlarging impulse. In the most memorable work, the black lines are thick, the area within them is white and the surrounding ground is sectioned off in big blocks of red and orange. The whole thing jumps. But each painting is very much its own pictorial being: vulnerable, rambunctious and fully inhabited.”
The work nourishes its own continuity. The paintings call to mind domestic or sacred objects that could be held in the hand or encountered in a forest or antique shop. The work of making the picture and contacting the surface with the brush and hand leaves behind evidence of a journey of decisions and a history of making and touch, much as a well-worn tool contains the history of the touch and work of its owner.
Chuck Webster is currently a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.