Hello Steve: The Works of Steve Wheeler    Sep 29 - Oct 20, 2005

During the 1940s and 50s, Steve Wheeler (1912-1992) created a highly original body of work that constitutes an important, relatively new chapter in the history of American modem art. He was the leading artist associated with the Indian Space Painters, an informal group active in New York during the late 1940s. Although he did not exhibit with the group, Wheeler is commonly considered to be a progenitor of the Indian Space movement, the Native American-inspired integration of organic and geometric pictographic forms within a flat, seamless space. Believing that art must emerge from its own time, Wheeler conveyed the dynamic nature of urban America in his complex, non-illusionistic, multi- dimensional paintings and works on paper. The primary element of Wheeler's art is the line which serves multiple, simultaneous functions of contour, path, and passage, taking the viewer on a journey beyond physical space into the mysterious, boundless world of both the artist's creative mind and the universal mind.