Donald Locke “The Plantation Series: Paintings and Sculptures from the 1970s”

Skoto Gallery

poster for Donald Locke “The Plantation Series: Paintings and Sculptures from the 1970s”
[Image: Donald Locke "Village Square" (1974) wood, vinyl, ceramic, stainless steel, 15x14.5x9 in.]

This event has ended.

Skoto Gallery presents a selection of paintings and sculpture from The Plantation Series of the 1970’s by Donald Locke. This is the third solo exhibition by the artist at the gallery.

Donald Locke (1930-2010) was a versatile and complex artist whose ability to express a vivid interior existence while simultaneously opening himself to some of the larger issues of our time is reflected consistently throughout his career. He has been on a restless intellectual and artistic quest since the late 1940s when he began to study art in his native Guyana. A seminal figure in the development of a critical framework to engage with issues of history, identity and authenticity for an emergent post-colonial generation at the dawn of independence in Africa and the Caribbean in the fifties and sixties, he was philosophically and stylistically an internationalist whose work reflected his rich and varied cultural experience.

The exhibition highlights a selection of paintings and sculpture from the Plantation Series of the 1970’s when he was still living in London, that confronts tradition while absorbing the formal tenets of modernism. His mixed media sculpture exponentially expanded the definition of modern ceramics through novel techniques, unusual media, and carefully conceived relationships to surrounding spaces.

Shown together for the first time in New York these early significant works are pure meditations upon the nature of shadow and light, material, texture and lines, and represent important ideas that capture moments of significant aesthetic development of the artist. As stated by the artist in the journal American Visions: “These are sculptural metaphors where forms are held in strict lines, connected together as If with chains held within a system of metal bars or metal grids, analogous to the system whereby one group of people were kept in economic and political subjugation by another group”.

Over the years, Donald Locke has developed a sculptural approach to clay that allows him to endow familiar forms with significance. An artist who values the creative process as a system of thinking, his mixed media ceramic sculpture is all the more arresting because of its intriguing combination of opposites of freedom and precision, of the texturally marked and smooth, of weight and buoyancy, of mass and space. .

Born 1930 in Stewartville, Demerara County, Guyana, South America. Donald Locke studied at Bath Academy of Arts, Corsham, England, 1954-57 on a British Council scholarship where his teachers included some of Britain’s leading avant-garde painters and sculptors including the renowned sculptor James Tower. In 1964 he graduated with honors from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland with a masters degree in art. After returning home to Guyana to work and teach for some time, he returned to Europe where he lived and practiced until he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979. He represented Guyana at the Twelfth Sao Paulo Biennial in 1971 and The World Black Festival of Arts, Lagos, Nigeria, 1977. He is in several collections including Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Guyana National Collection, Georgetown, Guyana and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The Tate Britain recently acquired Trophies of Empire, an important mixed media work by the artist from 1972-74 wh ich was included in ground breaking exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain organized by Rasheed Araeen, 1989-90 at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Media

Schedule

from April 14, 2016 to May 28, 2016

Opening Reception on 2016-04-14 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Donald Locke

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use