John Wesley
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce Question of Women, an exhibition of paintings by John Wesley. Bringing together fourteen major works from 1992 to 2004, the exhibition includes several paintings on loan from private collections that have never before been shown in New York, as well as five works from the artist’s studio being exhibited publicly for the first time. Also on view are a number of now-classic paintings, including Goodnight (1998) and Question of Women (1992).
In these works Wesley depicts women alone or in pairs, placing faces and bodies in sharp close-up or unexpected crop. The effect is a series of intimate, sometimes disorienting encounters. Flesh tones rendered in pinks and browns are outlined in black and set against powder-blue grounds that suggest infinite space and a strange, sealed privacy. Desire and distance collapse into one another, and eroticism emerges through the rhythmic design of Wesley’s precise, dynamic forms.
About the Artist:
For nearly fifty years, John Wesley (b. 1928) has created an unrelenting and remarkably singular body of work whose subject is no less than the American psyche. While many artists of his generation employed the popular image to explore contemporary culture, Wesley has used a comic-strip style and a disciplined compositional logic to make deeply personal, often hermetic paintings that touch on our most primal fears, joys, and desires.
Wesley has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions, including PS1/MoMA, New York; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Portikus, Frankfurt. His work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Kunstmuseum Basel. A permanent installation of his work is on view at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. This will be his sixty-fifth one-person exhibition and his eighth at Fredericks & Freiser.
