William Shearburn Gallery Santa Fe: 129 West San Francisco, 2nd Floor * Santa Fe, NM 87501

Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 5 - 7 pm

William Shearburn Gallery is pleased to present “On Paper,” a salon-style group exhibition celebrating a full spectrum of unique works on paper, a medium granting both immediacy and intimacy. The famous and the lesser known will be hung cheek to cheek in dialogue. Styles and genres will bend and boundaries blur. Artists in the show include Jean Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Louise Bourgeois, Ingrid Calame, Will Cotton, Howard Finster, David Kramer, Robert Motherwell, J.B. Murray, Peter Schuyff, James Siena, Philip Taaffe, Richard Tuttle, Jacques Villon, Andy Warhol and Terry Winters. New Mexico based artists include Thomas Ashcraft, Bob Gaylor, Andrew Gellatly, Gloria Graham, Tim Jag, Jennifer Joseph, Toadhouse, and Amy Westphal. For a complete list of artists, see below.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s crayon drawing from 1982 features an animated skull head, a noose and a hooded figure in anxious configuration. The text in David Kramer’s drawing, on the other hand, proclaims “I want to surround myself with those who make me feel good about my life,” a sentiment undercut by the two golden Miller High Life bottles represented next to the text.

In a more pastoral vein, a lush charcoal and watercolor drawing by Terry Winters casually but masterfully depicts a small branch with its shadow. Ingrid Calame layers color pencil tracings of found marks or stains on mylar to build an evocative abstract landscape. Philip Taaffe mines the flat decorative language of abstracted vegetable life in a tile-like drawing from 1993.

James Siena’s drawing of rectangles nested within rectangles shares an obsessive quality and oddly provokes the feeling of being looked at. T.R. Ericsson conjures ghosts with his image of a typewritten note executed in nicotine smoke.

Jacques Villon’s 1905 pencil portrait of a seated woman in a hat is perhaps the most traditional image of the exhibition, yet by 1913 he would exhibit his cubist drypoints in the historic Armory show in New York. Alex Katz continues this figurative tradition in a stylized pencil portrait of a woman, while Christopher Warrington renders it poignantly absurd with his cartoonish “Fruit Eater,” a hybrid dog-lady figure eating a banana. Robert Medvedz explodes the head, delicately detailing a problematic jumble of organic and inorganic matter, creating a portrait of us as we are now.

For further information and images please contact the gallery.

Artists in the exhibition include:

Thomas Ashcraft
Donald Baechler
Jean Michel Basquiat
Ross Bleckner
Louise Bourgeois
James Brown
Peter Cain
Ingrid Calame
Will Cotton
Leslie Dill
Jim Dine
Graham Dolphin
Sue Eisler
T.R. Ericsson
Howard Finster
Tony Fitzpatrick
Caio Fonseca
Suzan Frecon
Ellen Gallagher
Andrew Gellatly
Teo Gonzalez
Gloria Graham
Joseph Havel
Roni Horn
Jerald Ieans
Tim Jag
Jennifer Joseph
Alex Katz
Kit Keith
Jay Kelly
David Kramer
Tim Liddy
Suzanne McClelland
Robert Medvedz
Andrew Millner
Robert Motherwell
Antonio Murado
J.B. Murray
Craig Norton
Thomas Nozkowski
Gary Passanise
Enoc Perez
Judy Pfaff
Lucas Samaras
Fred Sandback
Peter Schuyff
James Siena
Tom Slaughter
Joe Sola
Peter Soriano
Erik Spehn
Donald Sultan
Philip Taaffe
Toadhouse
Richard Tuttle
Jack Tworkov
Jacques Villon
Andy Warhol
Christopher Warrington
William Wegman
Amy Westphal
Terry Winters