Under Glass: Masterworks on Paper

Peyton Wright Gallery is pleased to announce "Under Glass: Masterworks on Paper," an exhibition of works on paper by some of the gallery's most distinguished artists. Works on paper can have an intimacy and spontaneity not seen in other artistic media. Watercolor, pencil, ink, pastel, charcoal, and collage are all media that lend themselves well to paper. These works can take a wide variety of forms. Some artists can work exclusively on paper, while others make plein air drawings, or preparatory sketches for more complex works. Yet these creations can be fully realized artworks in their own right.

Among the artists included in the exhibition is Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who was one of America’s leading modernist painters and an early pioneer of abstract art. Together with Morgan Russell, he co-founded the avant-garde painting movement Synchromism, which produced luminous and rhythmic compositions of swirling and serpentine forms infused with a rich chromatic palette. The watercolors in the exhibit display a mastery of color and gestural composition.

Bauhaus-trained Herbert Bayer was a master of visual expression. Bayer worked as an artist, designer, and architect. His artistic mastery included monumental sculpture, photography, earthworks, and typographic design; naturally he produced an exceptional body of works on paper. His watercolor and ink drawings of mountain landscapes and the dynamic movement of water are charming and exuberant.

Paul Burlin achieved a great deal of early artistic success. He was one of the youngest artists to participate in the 1913 Armory Show – the revolutionary exhibition of avant-garde European work that can be credited with introducing modern art to the United States and stimulating the development of modernism in America. His artistic evolution took him through early modernism, through social realism, and finally to fully realized abstraction. Burlin’s paintings from the last decades of his life are filled with energy and movement, restlessness and cacophony, balanced with technical mastery and clarity of vision. This can be seen in the vibrant watercolors in this exhibition.

The exhibit also features work by Franz Kline, one of the premier abstract expressionists, and widely known for his large black and white gestural paintings. He also produced a number of works on paper. The works in this exhibit feature strong black strokes rendered in india ink on pages from the Manhattan telephone book. Esteban Vicente was a Spanish-born artist who settled in New York after the fall of the Spanish Republic. He was a lyrical abstractionist whose body of work spans eight decades. While his paintings display a mastery of color, the loosely outlined architectural forms in this charcoal drawing on paper possess a compelling quietude that commands the viewer's attention. Sam Francis was a widely admired abstract expressionist, a prolific printmaker and painter whose hallmark is his bold palette and brushwork. This exhibit features a charming and intimate watercolor. Larry Bell is a Taos-based artist associated with the Light and Space, a group of West Coast artists that includes James Turrell and Robert Irwin. He has experimented extensively with high-tech art methods such as thin film deposition technology, a technique utilized in his vapor drawings, such as the one seen in this exhibit.

Other artists in the exhibition include Joan Miro, Diego Rivera, Federico Castellon, Hans Hofmann, Joan Mitchell, and Norman Bluhm.

For more information, or for high-resolution images, please contact Kevin Paul at kevin@peytonwright.com or 505.989.9888