Warren Rohrer
Morning Fogs Trees and Leaves
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia
November 1 - December 14, 2002
Locks Gallery presents twelve, rarely seen paintings by WARREN ROHRER (1927-1995), one of Philadelphia's most important 20th-century painters. Known for his luminous, vibrantly-colored canvases, Warren Rohrer evolved in the late 1960s from a landscape painter to a deeply intuitive abstractionist. This exhibit focuses on the loose, improvised work from the early 70s that laid the framework for his mature work.
The artist spent the first twenty years of his career as a landscape painter. Most of his early works are highly abstracted views of the Pennsylvania countryside, particularly the farms of Lancaster County where he was born, and spent long periods of his life. Beginning in the early 1970s, Warren Rohrer made a decisive breakthrough in his paintings, which shifted toward abstract squares of color, punctuated by a grid.
The small painting First (1972) presages the rest of his work with its square format and allover almost purely abstract composition. Between 1972 and 1975, Warren Rohrer made the series of large, minimal paintings included in this exhibition. The works are noticeable for their stark structures--often with a smaller square centered inside the larger square of the painting--and simple, hatchmark-like brushstrokes, suggesting tilled fields, woven baskets, rows of seeds, or stitching on a quilt.
While the work of Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko deeply affected the artist during this period, Warren Rohrer's works retain their roots in his chosen subject matter: the planned and chance geometries of the agricultural landscape paired with the rhythms of farming life. In 1975, Warren Rohrer wrote "These processes of plowing, planting, cultivating and harvesting are very similar to my processes of layering, defining, obscuring."
The artist originally chose the title Morning Fogs Trees and Leaves for his 1974 show at Locks Gallery. Looking back at the period now, the artist was clearly then in the midst of a formative shift that became the foundation of his later work.
The first, large-scale museum exhibition of Warren Rohrer's work will be held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003. The artist began showing in Philadelphia in 1960 and had eight one-person shows with Locks Gallery between 1974-94. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum and Delaware Art Museum.
An accompanying catalogue illustrates all of the paintings in the exhibition.
LOCKS GALLERY
600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106
