John Wesley
Fredericks & Freiser is proud to announce an exhibition of paintings by John Wesley dating from 1962 to 1969. The presentation includes fourteen canvases and two painted sculptures, most of which have not been shown in the United States since the 1960s. This is Wesley’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery and the first historical show to focus exclusively on his work from this formative decade.
Don’t Eat My Eagle brings together works originally exhibited in Documenta V (1972), the Whitney Painting Annuals of 1968 and 1969, Galerie Ileana Sonnabend (Paris, 1965), and Wesley’s first New York gallery exhibition at Robert Elkon Gallery in 1963.
The exhibition coincides with a retrospective of 150 works on paper from 1961 to the present at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld (traveling to Kunsthalle Nürnberg), accompanied by a major catalogue. Wesley has also been commissioned to design the graphic identity for The Armory Show 2006, where his newest paintings will appear in the fair’s catalogue.
About the Artist
For more than forty years, John Wesley (b. 1928) has created a remarkably singular body of work whose subject is the American psyche. While many of his peers used popular imagery to map the cultural landscape, Wesley transformed the comic-strip line into a precise, emotionally charged language—one capable of delivering deeply personal, often hermetic paintings that strike at our most primal fears, joys, and desires.
Wesley has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including PS1/MoMA, Fogg Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Portikus, DAAD, and Museum Haus Lange. A large group of his works is permanently installed at Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. His paintings are held in major collections worldwide, including MoMA, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn, the Fogg, the Stedelijk, and the Ludwig Museum. Wesley has been featured on the covers of Artforum and Art in America, was the subject of Parkett No. 62, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Grant, and the 2005 Skowhegan Medal for Painting.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am–6pm.
