Lawrence Markey Inc.

Wayne Thiebaud Charcoal Still Lifes 1964–1974

at Lawrence Markey
San Antonio, TX

April 9–May 21, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday April 9, 5:30–7:30 pm

Lawrence Markey is pleased to present an exhibition of drawings by Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920). This exhibition will focus on charcoal still lifes, completed over the course of a decade, from 1964–1974.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition with an essay by Bill Berkson. An excerpt:

Of the drawings chosen for this exhibition, most began as procedural classroom setups, master-class demonstrations for student exercises. Although, going on 90, Thiebaud continues to teach, as he says, “on a volunteer basis,” the works here are of that earlier vintage, the 1960s and early ’70s, when his art and his teaching had together achieved their levels of mastery sustained ever since. (Some were exhibited at Allan Stone’s gallery in New York in the mid-60s but rarely, if at all, afterward.) Every sheet shows two, three or a few, “various and sundry things,” mostly commonplace items small- and/or medium-size as you tabulate, tick them off: comb, coffee pot, a cup, a can, a bowl, a pocket watch -- the individual fact distinctly presented with what Thiebaud has called “an independent repose.” A practice spilled over into pedagogy with guidelines at once principled and occasion-specific: “Forget about finding what’s there but making what is there;” and further, “Focus, edit, change and modify.”

Wayne Thiebaud is regarded as one of America’s great contemporary painters. His much recounted rise to national prominence in the early 1960’s started with an exhibition of paintings devoted to still life, offering a new perspective on an aspect of traditional realist subject matter. Influenced by the brushwork of the action and color field painters and the compositional arrangements of Chardin, Manet, and Morandi amongst other heroes, Thiebaud emerged with paintings charged with daring, unorthodox uses of color, shifts in perspective, and heavily applied impasto; the resultant cakes, pies, and the like seemed almost carved out of paint.

With a lengthy career spanning decades of painting, Wayne Thiebaud is the recipient of numerous awards, including the distinguished National Medal of Arts conferred by President Clinton in 1994. Thiebaud's works are found in the collections of the world's most prestigious galleries and museums, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery, and San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art.

Wayne Thiebaud Charcoal Still Lifes 1964–1974 will travel to Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA, September 7–October 30, 2010.