NYAB Event - Thornton Dial Exhibition

Thornton Dial Exhibition

Andrew Edlin Gallery

This event has ended.

This showing of Dial's work, the artist's first solo exhibition in New York in more than a decade, will coincide with the presentation of "Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial" at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (through September 18, 2011). Highlighting the ways in which Dial's work addresses some of the most urgent issues of our time—war, racism and bigotry, poverty, the affirmation of personal dignity in the face of oppression—this museum exhibition is the most comprehensive survey ever mounted of the artist's work in various media.

Similarly, the gallery's "Thornton Dial" exhibition will offer a focused selection of works that touch upon the artist's enduring themes and that showcase the variety, richness and complexity of his art-making techniques. Dial, who was born in 1928, worked in and around Bessemer, Alabama, as a bricklayer, carpenter, and later as a welder in a railway-carriage factory. He also made steel furniture in a family-owned business and went on to produce mixed-media constructions in the Southern, African-American tradition of homemade yard art, which later evolved into the large, abstract assemblages and wall-mounted, three-dimensional paintings for which he is now internationally known.

Among other emblematic works, Thornton Dial will feature such wall-mounted, mixed-media paintings as We All Live Under the Same Old Flag (2010), Dial's multi-textured take on Old Glory made of cloth, wood, bones, wire, canvas and other materials, all painted red, white and blue, and Master of Space (2004), a picture of a noble eagle with spread-open wings made of painted neckties, set against a gridded background, that exudes a haunting, funereal air. Freedom Cloth (2005) is a free-standing piece made up of numerous, paint-colored swatches of fabric tied to a metal frame and little bird forms made of similar scraps of cloth. Also made with coat hangers, artificial flowers and spray paint, this sculptural work, at once enigmatic and charming, has the strange allure of a large-scale talisman.