PAUL THIEBAUD GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO - NEW LOCATION
INAUGURAL SHOW - WAYNE THIEBAUD: CONFECTION MEMORIES
San Francisco, California: The Paul Thiebaud Gallery proudly announces their move to 645 Chestnut Street (cross streets: Columbus Avenue and Mason Street) in San Francisco. Located in the neighborhood of North Beach, the new space formerly housed the Charles Campbell Gallery. The relocation continues the gallery’s presence in the neighborhood of North Beach yet allows for the merging of the exhibition space and the administrative offices into one building. The gallery no longer occupies either the gallery space at 718 Columbus Avenue or the administrative offices at 631 Union Street. With the advent of a permanent site, the gallery will launch a special programming schedule for 2009 comprised of three three-month long shows.
To inaugurate the space, we present Wayne Thiebaud: Confection Memories opening on Wednesday, April 1. On view through Saturday, June 27, 2009, the show offers recent still life compositions of food imagery in a variety of media, positing the genre as an ongoing exploration within the artist’s career. At the age of 88, Wayne Thiebaud is regarded as one of America’s greatest contemporary painters. His much recounted rise to national prominence in early 1960s started with a show of paintings devoted to still life, offering a new perspective on a traditional realist subject matter. Influenced by the brushwork of the action and color field painters and the compositional arrangements of Chardin, Manet, and Morandi amongst other heroes, Thiebaud emerged on the scene with paintings charged with daring, unorthodox uses of color, shifts in perspective, and heavily applied impasto; the resultant cakes, pies, and the like seemed almost carved out of paint.
All of the works in the show were painted from memory. The sketchbook drawings are included to demonstrate how compositional exploration from memory allows such a richness of possibilities over the years. Throughout his career, Thiebaud never abandoned food imagery. Though never produced in the concentration of the 1960s and early 1970s, he continues to use and re-use still life themes in his work as vehicles to explore formal issues of painting. One may recognize a cake or ice cream sundae in his work, yet the painting in which the object resides is never the same from one work to the next. The material in this show allow one to see where the renderings of sugary confections have led after more than forty years of continuous painting and teaching.
With a lengthy career spanning over seventy years of painting, Wayne Thiebaud is the recipient of numerous awards, including the distinguished National Medal of Arts conferred by President Clinton in 1994. He serves as a Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Davis, where he began teaching in 1960. He continues to live and work in Sacramento.
Public Reception — Wednesday, April 1, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm.
