Roy Newell "The Private Myth"
Carolina Nitsch Project Room
This event has ended.
Working in almost complete isolation, he continually repainted over five decades a group of some 50 works. A number of these paintings he began in the 1950s and worked on until his death in 2006. Many of them were painted on small three dimensional supports only inches wide. These small box-like panels bear witness to a lifetime of work buried within their dense physical residue. Time collapses while viewing these works; days, weeks, months and years; thousands of hours compressed within a single object.
Newell’s work was out of step with that of his peers. His style increasingly embraced anti-bravura and intimacy of scale at a time when the heroics of the big gesture held the day. Among his closest friends were Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. However, Newell was privately developing a highly personal form of non-gestural minimalist painting that presaged the post-minimal painters of the following generation.
This is the first exhibition of Roy Newell’s work since his death. During his lifetime the total number of solo shows was less than ten. His work is in public and private collections including the Guggenheim Museum.
Media
Schedule
from January 15, 2010 to March 13, 2010