FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

WILLIAM T. WILEY:

CURRENTS

 

February 5 – March 6, 2004

 

 

 

With his first exhibition at the Charles Cowles Gallery, WILLIAM T. WILEY presents new paintings and works on paper that continue to engage paradox through irony and derisive, razor-sharp wit.  These works remain true to WILEY’s oeuvre as they continue to play with the relationship between image and text; the result creates enough friction to spark a wide variety of meaning and mood, as often the work oscillates between tones, notably, comic and serious.  In these new works, one best be on guard as this artistic prankster may well be at his most serious when he is at his most mischievous.

 

WILEY, one of the seminal members of the 1960’s San Francisco Bay Area Funk and Super-Object movements, has always concerned himself with current affairs.  While WILEY works in his studio he often listens to news radio with brush or charcoal in hand.  WILEY channels his ideas into his art simultaneously visualizing his painting while processing the incoming newspeak .  WILEY paints what he sees, and he writes what he thinks.  When asked which idea comes to his mind first, image or text, WILEY has replied, “Sometimes word, sometimes image.”  Graham Beal said WILEY’s artistic domain is “where an entity is on the verge of becoming something else.”

 

WILEY’s imagery is inspired by a wide variety of inspiration which ranges from his childhood Red Rider comic books to Hieronymous Bosch and Peter Bruegel.  WILEY has said, “things that interest me most [in the work of Bosch and Breugel] are reproductions…it’s those cropped versions of the works I’m really interested in.”  But his strongest influence was a high school art teacher who taught the importance of inclusion in art.  This idea of inclusion helps to explain the duplicity in his work, high with low, comic with tragic, modern and historic.  WILEY has said before, “things that are enigmatic seem clearer to me than that which is supposed to be clear."

 

WILEY’s works are in distinguished museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

The exhibition will be on view at the Charles Cowles Gallery, 537 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea.  Hours are 10am to 6pm, Tuesday through Saturday. There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, February 5  from 5:30-7:30 pm.

For further information or photographs, please contact the gallery.

 

Above image: Reconstructing Ampersand -- with McGou & Magritte & J.C., 2002, oil on canvas, 73 ½ x 80"