Thomas Chimes: Complete Circle
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia
January 19 - February 24, 2001
Complete Circle presents the early and later work of noted artist THOMAS CHIMES: a series of metal box constructions from 1965-1973 paired with related new paintings. Thomas Chimes is best known for his portraits of fin-de-siecle literary figures painted on wood panels, which followed the box series and large-scale white portraits where the figures emerge from a glowing, mist-like background.
The intricate design of Thomas Chimes's metal boxes, with their inlaid drawings, precision gadgetry and murky peep holes are a witty and allusive synthesis of Surrealism, Art Deco, and Pop. Their sensuous curves are often paired with technical drawings and words resembling the caricatures and equations of his recent paintings.
Starting with the metal boxes, Thomas Chimes has identified with the work of the French Symbolist writer, Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), an originator of the Theater of the Absurd and a pivotal figure in the transition from Symbolism to modernism. Thomas Chimes always approaches Jarry in a conceptual vein; recent silhouettes and caricatures of Jarry are enclosed by a circle, symbolizing unity and a metaphysical aura. The paintings are small, less than a foot square, and their surfaces are subtly varied from a luminous near-white to a diffused, absorptive gray. Images and inscriptions in the paintings are built up, revised, and obscured from over twenty glazes of titantium white and Mars black paint.
Concurrent with the exhibit at Locks Gallery, Thomas Chimes has a retrospective at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, Ireland. His work is in museums across the U.S., including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently exhibited a panel portrait, Portrait of Alfred Jarry from 1974.
Accompanying the exhibit is a fully-illustrated catalogue with an essay by David Cohen.
LOCKS GALLERY
600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia PA 19106
