William Scott Exhibition
Fergus McCaffrey
This event has ended.
McCaffrey Fine Art is proud to present a survey exhibition of the work of William Scott. The first major overview of Scott s work in New York in almost twenty years, it features thirty-five paintings and works on paper created between 1950 and 1986.
Born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1913 and reared in Northern Ireland, Scott received his art training in Belfast and London. An outward-looking soul in the often provincial London art scene, Scott was engrossed with developments in the arts of continental Europe and the United States throughout his career. While remaining faithful to the centuries-old genres of still life and the nude, he pursued innovation through the use of an intentionally awkward line, aggressive impasto, and flattened perspective, creating works that possess great subtlety and resonance.
Repeatedly marking, refining, erasing, adding, and deleting, Scott established a dialogue between subject, background, and genre, through which an expression of an entirely different thing grows, a figure into landscape or into a still life, a man into a woman. This in-between-ness is at the heart of Scott s work as he once remarked, I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and the erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life.
Upon meeting Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock on a visit to New York in 1953, he found new freedom in scale and color, and his canvases enlarged and the palette warmed upon his return to Britain. Scott s first exhibition in New York took place the following year at the Martha Jackson Gallery, where he would show until 1979, to great acclaim. However, a lapse in representation in the United States thereafter led to the virtual disappearance of this singular figure from the American viewing public. Scott passed away in 1989, and this exhibition presents an opportunity to become reacquainted with the artist and his work.
[Photo: Jorge Lewinski "William Scott in his London studio, 1972 (detail)" © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth]
Media
Schedule
from February 27, 2010 to April 14, 2010