Bill Jacklin “Paintings from 1986 to 2016”

Marlborough (Midtown)

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Marlborough Gallery presents the exhibition of work by Bill Jacklin. Bill Jacklin: Paintings from 1986 to 2016 spans thirty years of the artist’s work painted in locations from New York and London, to the Italian city of Florence.

The exhibition is comprised of 21 paintings, all of which explore space and light, people and places ranging from the darker and more precisely rendered Meatpackers NYC II (1986) to the dream-like Embrace: Grand Central III (2016). One of the constants in Jacklin’s long career has been his frequent play with dualities: in addition to light and shadow, there is order and chaos, energy stored versus energy being released, and most important of all, representation and abstraction. As writer Eric Bryant observes in the exhibition catalogue, “Viewers who search out a wider array of Jacklin’s work, or simply look more closely at these paintings will soon see the lineup of distinct styles dissolve into an intertwined network of borrowed and reworked elements.”

Jacklin, who was born in Hampstead, London, England, relocated to New York City in 1985. As an avid world traveler and observer of people, the depiction of idealized impressions of cities visited and the life within has served as an act of remembrance for the artist. Snow, Times Square I (2008) shows a lone couple in the foreground, shadowed together under one umbrella, walking across an almost empty Times Square blanketed in a radiantly glowing freshly fallen snow. Time seems to have stopped here in more ways than one. Not only has a moment been captured, but that moment might have taken place last week or fifty years ago. The synchronicity of Jacklin’s newest paintings remain as compelling as the now classic works from the mid-1980s.

In 1989 Bill Jacklin was elected Associate Member of the Royal Academy, London (ARA) and in 1991, Royal Academician. In 1992 he had a retrospective exhibition, Urban Portraits, New York 1986-1992, at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford which traveled to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In 1993 he spent three months in Hong Kong as the British Council’s first artist-in-residence. He was commissioned by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority to do a mural size painting, six by twenty-four feet, for the new terminal designed and overseen by Cesar Pelli, Associates for Washington National Airport in 1997. Most recently, in 2016, Jacklin mounted dual exhibitions at Marlborough Fine Art, London and The Royal Academy of Art, London.

Jacklin’s work can be found in over 40 public collections. Among them are: Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; British Museum, London, England; Tate, London, England; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, Castagnola, Spain; National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.