The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Town and Country, curated by gallery artist Trevor Winkfield, featuring work by artists:
Wilson Bentley
Charles Burchfield
Gregory Crane
Tim Davis
Amédée de la Patellière
David Deutsch
Arthur Dove
Suzanne Duchamp
Louis Eilshemius
Jane Freilicher
Elliott Green
Marsden Hartley
Jean Hélion
Charles Jones
Alex Katz
Jonathan Lasker
Stephen Mueller
Paul Signac
David Storey
Graham Sutherland
Susan Unterberg
Denton Welch
Jack Yeats
Albert York
As opposed to an inclusive survey, Town and Country was conceived as, "a sampling of souvenirs from both rural and urban areas spanning over 100 years."
Trevor Winkfield elaborates:
Working inland from the coast, we first come across a cliff view of the Irish sea by Jack Yeats, painted around 1920, followed by a recent freshwater close-up of fish by photographer Susan Unterberg. No doubt Elliott Green's amorphous monsters lurk nearby, too. The Neo-Romantic Graham Sutherland takes us through entangled foliage, beneath which one would not be at all surprised to find horse chestnuts scattered by Jean Hélion, or Thomas Jones' vegetables growing. Beyond Jonathan Lasker's abstract trees and those of Albert York we find the first intimations of human dwelling in Denton Welch's eerie Coffin House (painted in wartime Britain), a prelude to the squat suburban house of David Deutsch, against which Arthur Dove's ladder might be conveniently propped.
Marcel's sister, Suzanne Duchamp, shows us a Dada factory as seen in 1920, just across the way from another dwelling by Charles Burchfield (surrounded by a Marsden Hartley fence). Entertainment is provided by Paul Signac's landmark pointillist theater programme (1888), and perhaps by Louis Eilshemius's lascivious nude at rest. An altogether more serious nude (and one of her strangest) by Jane Freilicher points us once more towards the ocean, where moons by Stephen Mueller will soon rise, followed somewhat later by a snowfall courtesy of Snowflake Bentley. Finally, Gregory Crane's four-panel homage to the seasons brings together town and country, both.
Trevor Winkfield moved to New York from his native England in 1969. The artist combines in his paintings strikingly absurdist and unpredictable juxtapositions of disparate images, all rendered in a flat graphic style. His paintings often hint at narratives, although they can also be read as carefully constructed abstractions with recognizable objects worked in the compositions.
Winkfield's work has been the subject of over fifteen solo exhibitions throughout the United States. He has received numerous awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2002, Winkfield was awarded the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by the French government. The artist has written extensively about art and until this year was a co-editor of The Sienese Shredder, a journal on art and literature.