JESS “Looking Past Seeing Through”
Tibor de Nagy Gallery
This event has ended.
The Tibor de Nagy Gallery presents its fourth exhibition of works by the celebrated painter and collage artist Jess (Collins), a leading light of the 1950s Bay Area renaissance of artists and poets, and one of the most original American artists of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition coincides with “An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle,” at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, which explores one of the most productive artistic couples, often collaborators, and their milieu.
Jess is best known for his paste-ups and paintings that he referred to as his “salvages,” “translations,” and “romantic paintings.” His paste-ups are complicated Surrealist collages assembled using magazines, photographs, and any other material at hand. The “translations,” which comprise thirty-two paintings completed over thirty years, borrow images from a range of sources, including scientific illustrations, childhood photographs, and postcards. He used the term “salvages” for those works he created on paintings he found at thrift stores, or unfinished canvases of his own.
The exhibition will present a range of works from the 1950s to the 1990s, including seminal works from his oeuvre such as his first translation from 1959, and a rare 1954 collage from his Tricky Cad series. Tricky Cad was a series of collages in which words and images from Dick Tracy cartoons were rearranged into a garbled, Surrealist text. The series pre-figured Pop and is among the artist’s most significant series of early works.
Media
Schedule
from January 16, 2014 to February 22, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-01-16 from 17:00 to 19:00