Timothy App: The Lost Paintings
January 26- March 10, 2017
Reception: Thursday, January 26th from 6 to 8pm
Curated by Amy Eva Raehse
Goya Contemporary Gallery
3000 Chestnut Avenue, Mill 214, Baltimore, MD 21211
For Immediate Release: Goya Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Contemporary American artist Timothy App (B. 1947 Akron, OH), whose work is in numerous private and public collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox in NY, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Santa Fe, The Tucson Museum of Art, Art Cloud Korea, among others.
Timothy App attended Kent State University in Ohio, where he received a BFA degree in painting in 1970. He continued his study of painting at Tyler School of Art of Temple University and in 1974 received an MFA. During his thirty-seven years of teaching, he has taught at Pomona College in California, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and since 1990 at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. With many one-person and group exhibitions since 1970, he has shown his abstract paintings regionally, nationally and abroad including in Poland and Japan. App is a recipient of a NEA fellowship in painting, as well as an individual artist's grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. Twice he has received the Trustee's Award for Excellence in Teaching at MICA, and has been nominated for the Richard C. Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship. In addition to painting and teaching, App has written on the work of other artists, lectured on his own work, and curated exhibitions.
The exhibition, Timothy App: The Lost Paintings, will feature 6 large paintings re-authored by the artist. A work of art is termed “lost” when credible sources —be it historians, scholars, or the actual creator —classify the work as having once existed but is no longer accounted for in studios, workshops, museums, collections, or cultural institutions. It is a work that has vanished. In some cases, lost artworks have been purposely or nefariously destroyed, in other cases the work is a victim of accident, theft, war, bad stewardship, or unfavorable environmental conditions. The seeds for the exhibition Timothy App: The Lost Paintings were planted in 2012 and 2013 as we began working toward a solo, retrospective exhibition at American University Museum, The Katzen. The bespoke exhibition was a didactic presentation of App’s working method and formal development over a span of 45 years, and paid tribute to the artist’s complex exploration of, and contribution to, abstract painting in a larger historical narrative. Our focus, then, was to point to the artist’s signature style of geometric abstraction, with its assertive visual tensions, to reveal a concise and thoughtful understanding of the nature of painting that we titled The Aesthetics of Precision. If the carefulness of this artist hadn’t been established clearly before, then it certainly was after The Aesthetics of Precision: Forty-Five Years of Painting. But there was a curious exception. Amid excavating earlier works from the artist’s archives, we were befuddled to learn that in App’s oeuvre, there existed 6 paintings —important to the artist’s evolution and executed simultaneously—that had gone missing. The loss stuck with me, as a curator, because it created a small gap in the sequence of otherwise accounted for works. There was no explanation. No delicious story. No acquisition history. The work had simply disappeared. In 2016 App, with guidance from slides of the original paintings, decided to remake these works, modified in scale, but fundamentally adhering to the original draughts. It is this group of paintings, revisited and rediscovered, that we present to you in this rare exhibition of ‘new-early work’ by Timothy App titled “The Lost Paintings.”
Of the paintings, App says: “On the heels of a youthful and inspired engagement with the specific objects of Minimalism, site-specific installations, and earthworks during the late 1960s and early 1970s, I returned to painting, and did so in earnest. What I decided to do flew in the face of orthodox Minimalism, as I brought with me tenants of reductivist theory and applied them to painting. I was also enamored of the Color Field painters and their singular, rhapsodic devotion to color and the painted surface. Repetition of identical units, with its promise of transcendent anonymity, along with arithmetically measured forms and spaces, entered my work unabashedly. Specific color--the unadulterated unanimity of color and shape--was a driving force in these paintings. That, and the Cartesian grid providing a place to hang the color. I deployed a limited palette of bright color via complex grids, trying to keep the color alive and moving, seeking transformation, albeit with the simplest of means. With single-minded focus, I was seeking to override outside influences, all the while looking for authentic ways to make paintings.”
He continues: “Little did I know during those early years that these “lost” paintings (the originals have gone missing), along with dozens of works done at that time, were harbingers of works to come. They marked the beginning of a lifelong involvement with light, measure, and the painted surface that, incidentally, was so comprehensively chronicled in 2013 by the 45-year retrospective at the Katzen Art Museum. Today I see their genetic code in all that I think and do, in all the paintings I make. To see these paintings again, re-made to my indulgent liking, has been an absolutely joyous revelation.” [Timothy App, 2016]
In tandem with “The Lost Paintings,” we will also showcase several new, yet atypically smaller works recently completed by the artist. The exhibitions bring together various aspects of the artist’s laborious practice, demonstrating his stature as one of the region’s most important living painters.
About Goya Contemporary
Goya Contemporary Gallery promotes the art and culture of our time by presenting ideas through exhibitions, curatorial practice, catalogues, print publishing, artist representation, and collections. The gallery builds private & public collections, assist in acquisitions, and facilitates auction activity. Goya Contemporary has earned international acclaim for its thought-provoking exhibitions, innovative programming, and unique collaborations with artists. Known as one of the most prestigious and long running galleries in the mid-Atlantic, Goya is dedicated to scholarly programming, and promoting the work of mid-career artists both internationally and locally.
Goya Contemporary is free and open to the public.
Hours of operation: Tue – Fri, 10am – 6pm / Saturday, noon-5pm by appointment
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Amy Eva Raehse, Executive Director & Curator at Goya Contemporary Gallery
P: 410-366-2001 / amy@goyacontemporary.com / gallery@goyacontemporary.com
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