Bill Lowe Gallery is proud to present a collection of the four last works completed by Thornton Dial prior to his death in January 2016. These remarkable pieces serve as a punctuation mark to the trajectory of Dial’s works, which ultimately evolved into more muted, less agitated surfaces that retain his masterful handling of materials. 

Each of these masterpieces provide a poignant glimpse into Dial’s emotional sensitivity and his romantic impulses, as well as his advanced artistic sophistication. Their distilled and refined elegance convey a somewhat stark contrast to the magisterial assemblages that characterized two decades of his work 

In 1993, Dial made his New York museum solo debut with Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger, at the New Museum (in association with the American Folk Art Museum). Of these works, Amiri Baraka said: “The paintings featured in Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger will have to be acknowledged, one day soon, as one of the most important artistic gestalts by a North American painter of the period, and remember that these are a single fragment of Dial’s oeuvre.” 

Roberta Smith, writing in The New York Times, said: “Thornton Dial’s work is just one more sign of things to come, and of things already here.” Since then, Dial’s work grew exponentially in thematic scope and material virtuosity.  This reached a crescendo with the historic exhibition,  History Refused to Die at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the spring of 2018.

The works of Dial’s two-decade-plus maturity have come to be viewed as deeply self-reflective masterpieces, each addressing some of the most salient challenges of American art and history. Dial is a history painter, unflinching in his treatment of the darkest American tragedies and deepest wounds.  But as he neared the end of his life, Dial’s themes embraced the beauty of life and contemplated mortality.