JAMES McGARRELL
Small Paintings and Glazed Porcelain Tiles
September 12 – October 12, 2002
During September and October the George Adams Gallery will present new work by James McGarrell. The exhibition will feature new small canvases and recent works in blue and white porcelain tile. This exhibition is McGarrell’s 19th one-man show at the gallery since 1961.
In a departure from his most recent exhibitions, which featured large-scale, multi-paneled paintings, the works included in this current exhibition are small – 10 x 10 inch - canvases. Although intimately scaled, the paintings are not sketches but fully developed and often carefully detailed narrative paintings. For example, “Erigone” depicts a scene from classical Greek mythology, in which Erigone, the daughter of the discoverer of the recipe for wine, comes upon her father shortly after he has sampled the results of his labor. The small canvas depicts the two figures, one recumbent beside a wine vat in an orchard set in a lush Mediterranean landscape. In addition to the single canvases there are also several small-scale diptychs. “Farm Fire,” for example, depicts a conflagration seen through a barn door, and juxtaposes an interior with an exterior complete with farm animals in an 8 x 20-inch format.
Along with the canvases, the gallery will also show several works in blue and white porcelain tile. McGarrell first exhibited his glazed porcelain tiles in 1995, and recently began working on more complex compositions consisting of multiple tiles. Two of the more ambitious tile compositions, “Night and Day” 2001, a 40-piece tile table top measuring 24 x 60 inches that is viewed from two sides, and “Falconer Self Portrait,” a landscape consisting of 24 tiles that measures18 x 48 inches, are both included in the current exhibition.
James McGarrell was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1930. Only four years out of graduate school at UCLA, McGarrell was the youngest of the twenty-three artists exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial “New Images of Man” exhibition in 1959. He has exhibited widely in both the United States and Europe, participating in five Whitney Museum Annuals and Biennials; two Carnegie International exhibitions; Documenta in Kassel, Germany; the Dunn International held at the Tate Gallery, London; “Modern American Paintings”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston and the National Pinakothiki, Athens, Greece; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Venice Biennale. He currently lives and works in Newbury, Vermont.
The exhibition will continue through October 12th. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday 10 am to 6 pm. Images from the exhibition are available on the gallery's website at www.artnet.com/gadams.html and on the Art Dealers Association website, www.artdealers.org.
