Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
January 24 - April 5, 1998
"There's a comic-maniac edge to these paintings produced by gross exaggerations and crazy juxtapositions. It's expressive of the insane collage of relationships I'm dealing with." -Robert Colescott
Following its premiere at the 47th Venice Biennale, the exhibition Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings begins a two-year United States tour at the Walker Art Center. Organized by independent curator Miriam Roberts for SITE Santa Fe, the exhibition honors Arizona-based artist ROBERT COLESCOTT, the first painter to represent the United States at the Biennale since Jasper Johns in 1988, and the first African-American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the prestigious festival.
On view in the exhibition are 20 paintings from the past decade that employ a figurative vocabulary that challenges stereotypes and engenders debate on the state of human relations in the United States. Now 72, the Arizona-based Robert Colescott continues to produce vitally significant work and is an important role model for a younger generation of artists exploring issues of racialization, identity, power, and gender. Employing a highly personal combination of narrative figuration blended with an ironic viewpoint to address the major social issues of his time, Robert Colescott has created one of the most powerful bodies of work in recent American art.
According to curator Miriam Roberts, "Like the world they depict, Colescott's polyrhythmic, improvisational paintings are full of surprises--in juxtapositions of forms and colors, in distortions of scale, in inventions and interplays of space and structure. They are filled with diverse references to the history of art itself, not only in homages to specific paintings, but to the traditional conventions of his chosen medium - history painting, portraiture, landscape, still life and allegory."Simultaneously seductive, hilarious and disturbing, the paintings of Robert Colescott depict a world of contradictions and dichotomies--between art and life, tragedy and comedy, men and women, black and white, oppressor and victim, Europe and Africa, past and present. It is a world of exploitation, missed opportunities, unfulfilled potential and lost love. Above all, it is a world of ironies, where people, things and events are never quite what they first seem."
Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings begins with works from 1987, a year that marked a turning point in the artist's career. Though he continued to use satire and narrative figuration, he moved beyond the controversial images of racial stereotypes for which he had become known. Colescott expanded his range and began exploring universal themes, venturing into the realm of mythological and religious allegory and sophisticated literary allusions. Writing in Arts magazine in 1988, Linda McGreevy said: "Colescott proves himself a moralist, a history painter in the deepest sense, whose webs of cultural cause and effect have come full circle to illuminate the present."
Born in Oakland, California, in 1925, ROBERT COLESCOTT studied at the University of California at Berkeley and with Fernand Léger in Paris before participating in the resurgence of figurative art on the West Coast during the 1950s. But it was his sojourn in Cairo, Egypt, in the 1960s that compelled the artist to infuse his work with a dynamic blend of color, historical reference, and style. Three thousand years of non-European art, a strong narrative tradition, formal qualities such as the fluidity of the graphic line, monumentality of scale, vivid color, and a sense of pattern--all these elements had a profound, immediate, and lasting impact on his work. Emeritus Professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Colescott has received numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980, 1983) and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for Creative Painting and Drawing (1985).
An illustrated catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition contains essays by Miriam Roberts and Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and a leading Colescott scholar; a poem by Peabody Award and American Book Award-winning poet Quincy Troupe; a photographic portrait by photographer and conceptual artist Carrie Mae Weems; an exhibition checklist; and selected biographical information.
The exhibition is an official presentation of the U.S. Government and was organized by Miriam Roberts for the U.S. Pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale in association with SITE Santa Fe.
WALKER ART CENTER
Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403
