Andrew Lyght “Painting Structures”

Andrew Lyght “Painting Structures”

Skoto Gallery

This event has ended.

Skoto Gallery presents “Painting Structures”, an exhibition of recent mixed media work by the Guyana-born, dual citizen of Canada and US, New York-based artist Andrew Lyght. This is his first solo in New York since his highly acclaimed survey exhibition titled Full Circle at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz in 2016.

Andrew Lyght is best known for his elegant abstractions with strong sense of linear design and vibrant colors in different media. His work is informed by a sophisticated discourse on traditional philosophical concepts and deep understanding of art historical precedents. He is aware of the interplay of intention and accident, curiosity and discovery as well as the ability to reduce forms and ideas to their essence. He draws no hierarchical distinctions among different media, rather each facilitate a variety of ways to rigorously engage with the conceptual and aesthetic underpinnings of his work. Lyght draws on a life-long exploration of free-hand drawn lines, plane, volume and color to depict pictorial space, and seeks to find an alternative aesthetics and discursive frame work that mines the microcosm of his culture for symbols that can be universally understood. As stated by Barbara Rose, the esteemed art historian in her essay for the artist’s recent Full Circle retrospective at the Dorsky Museum: Andrew Lyght is an unusual artist in that he experienced both the archaic roots of modernism during his boyhood as well as the way in which modernism found freshness in non-Western and archaic culture.

Included in this exhibition is a selection of ten works from the Painting Structures series and five from the Blackboard Walls series, all dated 2017-2018. Working within the rectangular format of the picture and the view finder, Lyght exploits his mastery of the nuances of color and geometric abstraction by staining the wooden painting structures with oil stick, a logical and beautiful evolution in his abiding quest to push the pictorial support to the fore. Again, working within the rectangular format, Lyght has created objects out of the works on paper for the Blackboard series by building a wood structure for them to slip into and slide to one side. When not exhibited, these works on paper simply slip out and are stored in a flat file. By inventively handling his material within a formalist framework and a highly developed experimental approach to making art he creates work that is unorthodox, persistently innovative and infused with boundless energy.

Andrew Lyght was born 1949 in Georgetown, Guyana, South America, and studied in a master/apprenticeship format with the legendary artist and mentor Edward R. Burrowes (1903-1966), who gave free art education at his Working People Art Class established in the late 1940s. After winning Guyana’s top art prizes at the age of 19, he moved to Montreal, where he lived for eight years before relocating to New York City. He had his first solo show at the Nassau County Museum, which was followed by commissions for IBM and other corporate clients; his works are in several collections including The Pompidou Center, Paris, France; The World Bank, Washington DC; Goldm an Sachs, New York, Omnicon Group, Inc, New York and Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass. He is a recipient of several grants including the prestigious Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation award and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation award. For an artist whose resourcefulness as a designer, builder and artist is quite fluid, and dates back to his childhood days in Guyana, he has emphatically declared that: I have never divided nor made a distinction between life and career in art. It is not a career for me, it is a life.

Media

• Painting
• Installation

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