NYAB Event - Howard Buchwald Exhibition

Howard Buchwald Exhibition

Nancy Hoffman Gallery

This event has ended.

Nancy Hoffman Gallery presents a show of recent works of Howard Buchwald. This exhibition includes a wide range of work created during the past five and a half years since his last exhibition at this gallery.

From the beginning, Buchwald’s work has engaged the visual aspects of painting—ALL that is visible, as opposed to all other aspects (verbal or literary, etc.) that are “after the fact” and “interpretative”. In his recent works, there is a new approach to scale, surface, color and organization of the painting’s structure, evoking a new range of emotional response for the viewer.

His earlier work was de-centered, dispersed as an over-all vista. The conflict between internal shape and overall unitary surface (as a whole activated field or fabric) was central to these paintings and drawings.

In his new works, Buchwald employs shape differently—the challenge being to evade
the unwanted consequences and/or associations to a particular shape. The appeal of a shape (or figuration) lies in its clarity and simplicity, tending to fix and pause the eye as it roams the larger field of the work. It deflects an overall involvement, slowing down, blocking the rhythmic activity of the eye.

The artist has written:

“Painting is not in the service of some purpose, objective, image or idea residing outside, prior to, and independent of the specific work you see. There is, in my work, no preconceived image, color scheme, composition or arrangement. The process of invention, discovery and “working out” is part of the work’s meaning. Painting, for me, is not an instrument of executing, through craft or otherwise, an idea or image. There is no story, fable, myth or concatenation of material that needs translation and in any case is, if not irrelevant, always after the fact. I understand the anxiety that direct looking and feeling still produce, it is just that the need to seek resemblances, analogies, or labels is an attempt to overcome this feeling by supplementing what is right there in front of one to be looked at, and is largely beside the point. It is almost always unnecessary.”

Howard Buchwald was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943. He received a B.F.A.
from Cooper Union in 1964 and an M.A. from Hunter College in 1972. He has been awarded grants from Creative Artists Program Services (CAPS); The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts; Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; a fellowship from John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; and was twice awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The artist’s work has been shown at Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Art Museum, Princeton University, New Jersey; Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, Massachusetts; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York; Hunter College, New York; Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, Virginia; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

His work is included in the collections of William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science, Indiana; Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; Gulbenkian Foundation; Lannan Foundation, Palm Beach; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts; Miami-Dade Community College Art Gallery, Florida; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Arts Library, New Haven, Connecticut.

Howard Buchwald resides in New York City.

[Image: Howard Buchwald "Mapped (Large Red)" (2010) acrylic on canvas, 84 x 90 in.]