Neil Welliver: A Memorial Exhibition
September 8 – October 22, 2005

The gallery will present a memorial exhibition to commemorate the achievement of the painter Neil Welliver (1929 - 2005), who died in April at the age of 75.

At the core of this exhibition will be a group of seven large-scale paintings from the late 1970s and mid 1980s—the largest measuring 96 x 120 inches. During this period, Welliver eliminated the figure and perfected his mature style, focusing exclusively on the unromanticized landscape of the interior Maine woods. With surfaces of fluid strokes and pure color creating layers of forms woven with light, the paintings move back and forth between abstraction and representation. Subjects include snow-covered hills seen through thickets of birches and poplar, rushing streams, fallen brush, rocky cliffs, and barrens in bright midday light.

Like many of his immediate contemporaries, Welliver strove to develop a new paradigm for representational painting in a post-abstract expressionist, post-minimalist era. The critic Robert Hughes said of Welliver’s paintings from this period: “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.”

Welliver’s typical working method for making large-scale pictures, created in the studio, was to begin with an oil study done on site in the woods. This image would then be translated to rough drawings and finally to the full-scale painting housed in his imagination. Welliver’s rapid and deliberate painting style, working wet-on-wet from upper-left to lower-right of the canvas, produced a tension between the image depicted and the physicality of the surface.

Also included in the show will be a selection of oil studies and prints. A highlight will be the recent etching and woodcut editions completed with Welliver’s long-time master printmaker Shigemitsu Tsukaguchi, marking a close artistic collaboration that dates back to the late 1970s.

Welliver was born in rural Pennsylvania in 1929. After receiving his MFA from Yale in 1955, he was appointed to the faculty by his mentor Josef Albers. In 1965, after Albers’ death, Welliver became Chairman of the School of Fine Art at the University of Pennsylvania, commuting weekly from his farm in Maine, teaching until his retirement in 1989. Generations of artists and teachers have studied with and been influenced by him.

Welliver’s work has been the subject of over 100 one-person exhibitions since the mid-1950s. His paintings are represented in many American museum collections. Some of the finest examples can be found in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Big Erratics), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Birches), The Museum of Modern Art (Shadow), The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Late Squall), and The New Orleans Museum of Art (Crater Outlet).

Memorial exhibitions also will be presented in the fall by the Portland Museum of Art (Maine), University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) and the Asheville Museum of Art (North Carolina).

For further information and/or images contact Ellen Robinson at 212-755-2828 or at [email protected].