Summer 2020
Gary Panter: New Watercolors
July 10 – August 30, 2020 (Exclusively online)
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to present a virtual exhibition of new drawings by Gary Panter. Panter’s current drawing series features all-over character collections that are akin to cutting and pasting familiar elements together to make puzzles where the pieces don't meet. By scrapbooking a visual inventory, Panter groups like things together, categorizing influences and dreaming through drawing. The initial line-work is done directly with Japanese steel cartooning nibs and the ink dipped from an inkwell. Then watercolor is applied over the dry waterproof ink. In most cases the drawing is methodically ‘defaced’. This over-drawing is another way to indicate alliances between images as well as creating a poetic over-marking. Several drawings include “Dog Fin Wow” word variations that are anagrams for FOGWINDOW a long-term project name and the name of the band in which Panter performs. Here the word forms are without specific associations.
The exhibition includes 15 drawings that are approximately 11 x 8 ½ inches. The paper is hand cut so there are slight variations. These were all done in the period of the Covid-19 lock down 2020.
Gary Panter (b. 1950) has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Columbus College of Art and Design. He was included in “Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque,” the Fifth International Site Santa Fe Biennial, curated by Robert Storr; “Masters of American Comics” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Jewish Museum, New York; and “What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art 1960 to the Present,” at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, curated by Dan Nadel. He is the subject of a comprehensive monograph, Gary Panter (PictureBox), as well as the author of numerous graphic novels.