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Jane Wilson: Recent Paintings
November 12 – December 23, 2009

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to announce the November 12th opening of Jane Wilson: Recent Paintings. The exhibition comprises landscapes painted in the last two years. A full-color catalogue, with an essay by Stephen Westfall, accompanies the exhibition.

In her recent work, Wilson focuses on seasons of the year, times of day, and moods of the weather inspired, for the most part, by the sky, sea, and land of the East End of Long Island. Wilson directs her energies to making the most ephemeral phenomena visible, capturing the effects of shimmering light, heavy air, oncoming night, and passing thunderstorms. Westfall contends that Wilson is painting “at the height of her powers,” creating sky paintings that are “a perfect synthesis of abstraction and representation, field and tactile subject, the general and particular, process and memory.” Westfall observes, “Of all the painters who’ve painted wonderful skies (Tiepolo! Poussin!) very few have ever imparted such a visceral sense of the sky’s endlessly unfolding spatial theater.”

Wilson has been exhibiting steadily since 1953, when she was a founding member of the legendary Hansa Gallery on East 12th Street in New York City. At that time, she was working in an abstract expressionist mode, creating dynamic canvases that resonated with the energy of a defining moment in postwar American art. Currently, her work hovers between the tangible and the abstract. Paintings like Drifting Sunshower and Clearing Sky are luminous evocations that are nearly total renunciations of events other than events of the sky. They could just as easily be taken for abstract fields of pattern and color, yet the barest rudiments of land and sea, narrow bands at bottom that dissolve into the textures of light and clouds, create low horizons that are junctures of earth and sky. As Wilson has said, “For me it was all about the substance of things without substance.”