Neil Welliver “Paintings and Prints”

Alexandre Gallery

poster for Neil Welliver “Paintings and Prints”

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In the 1960s and 70s Neil Welliver (1929 – 2005) led a movement to redefine representational painting in a post-abstract expressionist, post-minimal world. This exhibition surveys Welliver’s work and includes prime early figurative subjects along side his mature landscapes from the 1980s and 90s of the unspoiled wilderness, some of which measure 96 inches square. Included also are a selection of masterful ukiyo-e woodcut prints, which were part of Welliver’s practice throughout his career. The late critic Robert Hughes wrote of Welliver’s work: “Such landscapes are ‘all-over’ paintings, slices taken from the boundless field of pictorial incident. They pay homage to the materialism of Courbet, and to large-scale nineteenth-century American landscape, and to Abstract Expressionism, all at once. His large paintings of the Maine woods could only have matured in the thirty years after Pollock.”

The poet Mark Strand observed: “Under his virtuosic manipulation of paint, behind the illusion-making, the suave conceptual grandeur that makes his Maine woods a virtual sufficiency of self, are an urgency and an energy that are stunning. This is why Welliver’s paintings are so emotionally dense, so assertive in their naturalness.”

Frank Goodyear, former director of the Pennsylvania Academy Museum who authored the 1985 Rizzoli monograph on Welliver, wrote: “Welliver’s perpetual genius is a balance between the objective and the non-objective, between the particular and the general, and between images and materials … The subject of landscape becomes a vehicle of expression for his deep commitment to the ideals of contemporary painting.”

Media

Schedule

from April 26, 2018 to June 29, 2018

Artist(s)

Neil Welliver

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