This exhibition is part of “25,” a yearlong series of exhibitions celebrating Goya artists in honor of our 25th anniversary For Immediate Release: Goya Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Contemporary American artist Timothy App (B. 1947 Akron, OH. Lives and works in Baltimore, MD), whose work is included numerous significant public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art; Albright-Knox Museum, NY; Long Beach Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts Santa Fe; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; Art Cloud, Korea; The Phillips Collection, DC; among others.
Over the last five decades, Timothy App has developed a body of work that engages a complex exploration of abstract painting and has contribution to the larger art historical narrative around geometric practice. App's signature style of geometric abstraction, with its assertive visual tensions, reveals a concise and thoughtful understanding of the nature of painting.
Talking about the work, App says: “These recent Threshold paintings are, in part, a confrontation with nothingness, placing the unsuspecting viewer on the brink of the unknown. And like much of my work, they are anthropometric in scale—body-sized-- and symmetrical, facilitating the human being’s moment of encounter. On another level, they are a continuation of my ongoing endeavor to find authentic ways of making a painting. They have evolved over twenty years in tandem with other series. Like all of my work, they demonstrate a coalescence of formal concerns that I have carried with me for a very long time.”
He further elaborates by saying: “With a static work of art, meaning lies in the immediate encounter … where the moment of recognition occurs. At that instant, every deployment of form, every nuance of color and tone, every juncture of vital elements become paramount, and are there for the viewer’s thoughtful perusal.”
The artist has remained productive through the innumerable challenges presented by the times in which we live. Looking inward at this moment, App reflects on a lifetime of painting in his exhibition accompanying “Notes on Painting” and states: “After so many years of painting with a consistent premise, the ‘larger context’ has all but evaporated. What I do as an artist has become so intrinsic to who I am, so ingrained psychically, so mirrored in my personal history, that matters of social and political relevance have become inconsequential to my labors as an artist. A patient search, through a persistent endeavor with formal and aesthetic concerns, is the antithesis of the struggle for power. And political and social exigencies, as inevitable and necessary as they are, feed on the acquisition of and use, or abuse, of power. If my work deals at all with power, then I would hope that it is the power of the eye and hand guided by the mind and the imagination.”
The exhibition, Timothy App: States of Mind, will feature 7 new, large scale paintings and 6 studies which bring together various aspects of the artist's evolution and growth, demonstrating his status as one of the region's most important living painters.
Timothy App attended Kent State University in Ohio, where he received a BFA degree in painting in 1970. He continued his study of painting at Tyler School of Art of Temple University and in 1974 received an MFA. During his [approximately] 40 years of teaching, he has taught at Pomona College in California, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and since 1990 until his recent retirement, at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. With many one-person and group exhibitions since 1970, App has shown his abstract paintings regionally, nationally and abroad including in Poland and Japan. App is a recipient of a NEA fellowship in painting, as well as an individual artist's grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. Twice he has received the Trustee's Award for Excellence in Teaching at MICA and has been nominated for the Richard C. Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship. In addition to painting and teaching, App has written on the work of other artists, lectured on his own work, and has curated exhibitions.
