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Faggionato Fine Art is proud to announce their forthcoming exhibition of the Californian artist Wayne Thiebaud. Known best for his deadpan still-life paintings from the 1960s of sugary confections, delicatessen counters, toys and everyday consumer objects, Thiebaud has continued to revisit these themes with an undiminished energy and vigour.
The exhibition comprises some twenty works including landscape and cityscape paintings of his native San Francisco with their distorted, dizzying views of the citys streets and hillsides, as well as still-lifes such as Little Deli, 2001 (illustrated above) and Table Setting, 2009.
The show takes the viewer on a journey of different subject matter, produced at different times in different eras and in different media. Whether a nude, a landscape, or a still life of a mans hat, the focus is the visual language the works all share: the luscious handling of heavily textured paint; the brilliant palette; the intensity of light; the shifts in perspective; simplified, conceptualised forms; and subject matter that glints, glimmers and glitters in a flawless dance with light and shadow.
Known as, and frequently referred to as a painters painter, Thiebaud is less concerned about a naturalistic depiction or true likeness of his subject, but more interested in solving formal issues. The artist explains: Painting is a series of problems that you are trying to solve base, colour, design, composition and those intrinsic characteristics, rather than all of the things which happen afterwards extrinsically expressions, individualism, subject matter, iconography. Its all important but first and foremost for me, is the formal plan.
For all its bright modernity Thiebauds art readily pays homage to past traditions. Whilst his brushwork is influenced by the action and colour field painters, the compositional arrangements look back to Chardin, Manet, Giorgio Morandi and Edward Hopper, amongst other heroes.
Born in 1920, Thiebaud first gained national attention in 1962 with a one person show of still life paintings at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. The first major retrospective of his work was held in 1985, followed by a second in 2001 - 02, which travelled from the Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most recently, his retrospective exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Seventy Years of Painting was held at the Palms Spring Museum which will travel to the San Jose Museum of Art in early 2010.
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