NYAB Event - Charles Burchfield Exhibition

This event has ended.
At D'Amelio Terras
Media: Drawing

Historically, Burchfield has long been associated with large-scale, fantastical watercolor depictions of the American landscape. This exhibition will focus on the artist’s graphite drawings from 1915 through 1950. More intimate in scale, Burchfield’s drawings suggest a complex state of mind as mundane forms take on sinister characteristics: dark shadows dominate the roofline, windows, and doorways of houses; phantasmagorical shapes and gnarled tree branches embody human like forms thus conveying a deep level of emotional fervor.
By presenting these early drawings in a more contemporary context, we hope to shed new light on the artist’s work. An obsessive collector, organizer, and archivist, Burchfield approached drawing as a means of constantly exploring and searching for form and meaning. Sketches and doodles often catalogue the natural world around him, emerging as the link between the outer world of nature and the inner world of the artist’s emotional life. In a journal entry dated July 11, 1952, Burchfield writes, “The subconscious mind seemed to be in complete control—-and I did unpremeditated things which later turned out to be exactly right.”

Reviews