Stuart Shils: The Perceptual Moment - Selected Works    Oct 16 - Nov 21, 2009

Stuart Shils' expressionist landscapes have been exhibited widely to great critical attention. His paintings, oil pastels, and monotypes take as their subject the rural landscapes of County Mayo, Ireland, Vermont, Indiana, and most recently Italy. Shils is a painter of specific moments, working quickly to capture shifting light and weather conditions, time of day and qualities of season. In a recent review, art critic Maureen Mullarkey observed that "his landscapes dwell on the uncertain border between representation and abstraction; increasingly, they cross into pure suggestion. Landscape is inseparable from scenery; yet scenes all but dissolve, Turner-like, in these modestly scaled oils. In their place is something more elusive, harder to evoke: the mood of a locale and the temper of its weather. With each successive show, Mr. Shils reveals himself as a poet of atmosphere."

In an exhibition essay on the artist's work, Justin Spring writes, "These beautifully focused small works are intimate in scale, suggesting that they have been designed for domestic spaces. They are inspired by European art of nearly two centuries ago, but the partake in the contemporary dialogue of New York painting. In recognizing and emulating the genius of Corot and other European, pre-modern masters and by incorporating them into what is essentially a contemporary style, Shils, an American painter, has suggested new ways to consider the politics and precedents of landscape in contemporary painting." Stuart Shils studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Philadelphia College of Art. Mr. Shils is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship for Residency in Ballycastle, Ireland, and the prestigious Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.