 Stuffed Toys 2004 Oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 22 1/8 in Wayne Thiebaud Paintings Faggionato Fine Arts is proud to announce their second exhibition of work by the American artist Wayne Thiebaud. The exhibition will include six works painted between 1996 and 2004: three large-scale pieces with related smaller scale works. The relationship between these sets of paintings is indicative of Thiebaud's "problem solving" approach to painting. In each set he pursues formal concerns, discovering in the earlier works a new focus brought to light in the course of painting, which he will then explore in the second piece. Throughout his career he has worked with the same subjects, still life, cityscapes, riverscapes; each of which is represented in the show. Though repeatedly focusing on these themes he never creates the same work twice. He has said that he finds problems in his finished works which lead him in a new direction. Thus in each work of comparable subject matter Thiebaud varies colour, space, light, brush-marks and form in a building process that has evolved into an ongoing exploration of the formal concerns of painting. Thiebaud first gained national attention in 1962 with a one person show of still life paintings at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. The still life genre has remained a dominant feature of his work. His characteristically reductive treatment of shapes and surfaces often results in images that seem to venerate display. The clear shadow-shapes that halo or outline each object betray an attachment to the light and order of the American scene. In the 1970's Thiebaud's work took a new direction when he began exploring the subject of urban San Francisco. The cityscapes, as they are generically known, still convey his love of long shadow and bright objects but the focus became perspective. With inventive distortions of vertical planes Thiebaud attempts to translate the sense of destabilisation that you experience on the San Francisco hills. The riverscapes, which have figured prominently in Thiebaud's work since the mid 1990s, appear to build on these perspectival extremes. Evocative of the Sacramento River Valley where the artist lives, the compositions are worked from memory. By combining multiple viewpoints Thiebaud creates optical uncertainty, forcing the viewer to take an extreme visual journey across the canvas. Implausible sources of daylight and irregular use of scale further enhance the spatial inconsistency creating crazy quilts of intensely coloured landscapes. Thiebaud has gained enormous critical success throughout his career with articles included in national publications such as Newsweek, ArtForum, Life and the New York Times. The first major retrospective of his work was held in 1985, followed by a second in 2001-02, which travelled from the Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Exhibition: November 30, 2004 - January 28, 2005 Gallery hours: Mon-Fri 10 - 6 pm, Sat 12 - 4 pm We will be closed for the Christmas period from 22 December - 4 January 2005 Faggionato Fine Arts 49 Albemarle St GB-London W1S 3JR Telephone + 44 20 74 09 79 79 Fax + 44 20 74 09 78 79 Email info@faggionato.com www.faggionato.com |
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