New
York: DC Moore Gallery – Jane Wilson at 90 – East Village/East End exhibition.
At the DC Moore Gallery, Jane Wilson at 90 East Village/East West exhibition,
until November 1, celebrates her sixty-year career. The exhibition features a
group of rarely seen 1960s cityscapes inspired by New York’s Tompkins Square
Park, as well as her recent work, which has brought her recognition as one of
the leading landscape painters of our time.
Photograph copyright - Jane Wilson - Courtesy DC Moore
Gallery, New York
Jane Wilson - Avenue B Bus,
1966 - oil on canvas
Photograph copyright - Jane Wilson - Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York
Jane Wilson at 90 – East Village/East End. Wilson’s recent paintings are
luminous landscapes that hover between abstraction and representation, inspired
by the sky, sea, and land of the East End of Long Island. She
focuses on events of the natural world, seasons of the year, times of day, and
the many moods of the weather. Evoking these constant occurrences, Wilson
directs her energies to making the most passing phenomena visible, to capturing
the effects of shimmering light, heavy air, and passing thunderstorms. In many
of her paintings, the sky, which can just as easily be taken as an abstract
field of pattern and color, is anchored by the barest rudiments of recession and
a low horizon that is a juncture of light and substance.
Above.
Jane Wilson - Sun After Rain, 1990 - oil on canvas.
Jane Wilson at 90 – East Village/East End. Wilson has been exhibiting
steadily since 1952, when she was a founding member of the legendary Hansa
Gallery on East 12th Street in New York City. A few years after moving to 317
East 10th Street, across from Tompkins Square Park, in 1958, she shifted from
abstraction and expressionist landscapes to New York cityscapes, particularly
atmospheric views of the park and surrounding neighborhood. In her Tompkins
Square paintings, she continued her interest in tonal effects of trees,
foliage, and grey skies, sometimes streaked with sunlight breaking through the
clouds, while at times introducing strong contrasts through primary colors of
stoplights, traffic markings, and other features of urban life.
Above. A portrait of Jane Wilson in 1957, painted by Fairfield Porter,
oil on canvas.
Jane Wilson at 90 – East Village/East End. In the early 1980s, Wilson
returned to landscapes and began creating the distinctive works for which she
is best known today. Her radiant paintings of the past three decades evoke the
rhythms of the natural world, marked by constantly changing dynamics of
everyday events of the sky.
“My landscapes are not painted on-site or from photographs. They come out of my mind… out of my bones,
really. I seek to capture what it feels
like to be there, on a strip of land or sand.
I move into a kind of recall about season, climate, time of day. It’s what I call ‘muscular recall’…the sense
of temperature and humidity… the wavering weight of the sky. All this motivates, defines selections, as I
begin to Paint.”
Jane Wilson at 90 – East Village/East End – Jane Wilson and her daughter
Julia Gruen
