Rodney Dickson Exhibition

David & Schweitzer Contemporary

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DAVID&SCHWEITZER Contemporary presents Rodney Dickson’s first one-person exhibition in New York since 2010.

Born in 1956 in Northern Ireland, Dickson grew up during the troubled years of civil disorder that engulfed that country, and that experience would shape his work for decades to come. When first encountering Dickson’s work, one may be drawn to a facile categorization of the work as abstract painting, but its immediacy and physicality begs for a broader appraisal.

Dickson’s work has never really been abstract (I don’t really believe anything is wholly abstract – we abstract from, abstraction is a verb not a noun) and one need simply observe Dickson’s tender and moving portraiture and landscape drawings to understand his roots lay in years of direct observation. His work has always been an urgent response to what has been going on in his life and to the world around him.

Dickson’s work reflects his experience of growing up in Northern Ireland, his interest in the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, and, in his most recent work, deals with a great personal tragedy. In all of these, his overwhelming physicality combined with a wide and intense color range (not usually seen in painting this thick) lend aspects to the work that are visceral, immediate and violent, and create a rhythm and pulse that speak to the deepest range of human emotions.

In his most recent works I believe Dickson is consciously and unconsciously trying to come to terms with that deeply personal tragedy. The openness and rawness of these canvases (whole areas are left blank in opposition and conjunction with thick vibrant impasto) express a sense of loss, and the beautiful and ebullient color recalls gardens and nature’s renewal triumphing over that sense of loss. These works call to mind both the profoundly tragic beauty of the paintings of Mark Rothko and the remarkable light and joyfulness found in the work of Joan Mitchell.

Something Mark Rothko once said could apply to Dickson’s work as well:

“I am not an abstractionist… I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else… I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.”

Dickson is the recipient of a Pollock Krasner Award and a Ford Foundation Artist Grant, and has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions at John Davis Gallery in Hudson (where he has an upcoming exhibition in the summer of 2018), New York, NUNU Fine Art in Taipei, Taiwan, and Gasser Grunert in New York City. Dickson’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Hanoi Art Center in Hanoi, Vietnam; Arts Council of Northern Ireland in Belfast, Ireland; Arts Council Of Great Britain in Manchester, England; Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland; and the Palmer Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.