Fredericks & Freiser
is pleased to announce an exhibition of John Wesley’s
Bumstead paintings (1974 to present). Appropriating
the classic Chic Young characters of Dagwood and Blondie
Bumstead, Wesley has created a remarkably prescient
body of work whose subject is no less than the American
psyche. While many artists of his generation have used
the popular image to explore the cultural landscape,
Wesley has employed a comic strip-style and a compositional
rigor to make deeply personal, often hermetic paintings
that strike at the core of our most primal fears, joys,
and desires. As Linda Norden writes in Parkett #62:
“The “Bumstead” paintings –
whether detailing scenes of domestic misunderstanding,
zooming in on off-camera moments of bafflement or simply
scanning empty halls and walls for private memories
– are excruciatingly specific representations
of the gulfs between feeling and comprehension…
smart, funny, startling, irreverently empathetic, and
often heartbreaking, they are a welcome antidote to
more laborious discourse.”
This is the first exhibition to focus on this major
series. Thirteen paintings will be on view, including
the first canvas painted in the series titled “The
Bumsteads” on loan from the Donald Judd Foundation
and the most recent painting “Bumstead and Dead
Geisha” completed in December, 2006. A hardcover
catalogue with a major essay by Robert Hobbs will accompany
the exhibition.
About the Artist
John Wesley (b. 1928) has had numerous one person museum
exhibitions including PS1/MoMA, New York; Fogg Art Museum,
Cambridge; Haus Lange, Krefeld; Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam,
and Portikus, Frankfurt. A permanent installation of
his paintings is on view at Donald Judd’s Chinati
Foundation, Marfa, Texas. Recently, he has been included
in several group exhibitions including “Full House,”
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; ”After
Cezanne,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;
“Funny Cuts: Cartoons and Comics in Contemporary
Art,” Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. He has had one
person gallery shows at Gagosian Gallery, London; Tomio
Koyama, Tokyo; and Zwirner & Wirth, New York. He
was the 2005 recipient of the Skowhegan Medal for Painting
and the flagship artist for The Armory Show, 2006. This
will be his seventh solo show at Fredericks & Freiser.
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