CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/28/2019

Landscape Painting Now book launch and panel discussion at the Whitney

Wednesday, April 17 from 7–9PM, the Whitney Shop and D.A.P. Publishing present the launch of Landscape Painting Now with a panel discussion featuring Verne Dawson, Lois Dodd, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Alison Elizabeth Taylor and Matthew Wong, moderated by author Barry Schwabsky.

Clockwise from top left: Verne Dawson, "Pagans" (2009); Alison Elizabeth Taylor, "Only Castles Burning…" (2017); Lois Dodd, "October Field" (2010); Matthew Wong, "Untitled" (2016); Enrique Martínez Celaya, "The Empire" (2015).

“In the twenty-first century, landscape painting is thriving,” writes Barry Schwabsky in Landscape Painting Now, a wide-ranging survey that makes a powerful argument for the vitality of the genre. Schwabsky, art critic for The Nation and primary author of the book, will moderate a discussion with five of the artists represented in Landscape Painting Now: Verne Dawson, Lois Dodd, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Alison Elizabeth Taylor and Matthew Wong. They will speak about the continued relevance of landscape painting in their own work and the culture at large, addressing how the genre can reflect the present—our increasingly digitally mediated existence and imminent environmental collapse—with urgency.

Featuring more than 400 reproductions, Landscape Painting Now is the first book of its kind to take a global view of its subject, featuring more than eighty outstanding contemporary artists—both established and emerging—whose ages span seven decades and who hail from twenty-five different countries. Schwabsky’s text traces the history of landscape painting from its origins in Eastern and Western art to its transformation in the twentieth century. Rounding out the book are shorter texts by art historians Robert R. Shane, Louise Sørensen and Susan A. Van Scoy introducing each artist.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and coeditor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include Heretics of Language (2018), The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (2016), and a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (2015).

In Verne Dawson’s (b. 1955) paintings, the ways in which we mark time, invent stories and symbols, and regard the governing structures of our civilizations and lives are caught up in a playful entanglement of narratives that includes the story of painting itself. A painter of fantastical landscapes, the cosmos, portraits and abstractions, Dawson weaves the prehistoric past into the present, embracing a vast history of some 30,000 years. Recently, Dawson has been the subject of one-person shows at Galleria Il Capricorno, Venice; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Le Consortium, Dijon; Camden Arts Centre, London and Kunsthalle, Zurich, as well as in significant international exhibitions such as the 2011 Yokohama Triennial, the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the 2006 Lyon Biennial, and the 2003 Venice Biennial.

Lois Dodd (b.1927) first studied art and textile design while attending Cooper Union from 1945 to 1948. While her over seventy-year-long career runs parallel to many major artistic movements, most notably Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, her dedication to pursuing her own vision has consistently defied categorization. She is known for the careful simplicity of her paintings, which illustrate her attentiveness to, and appreciation for, the scenes she encounters in her immediate environment. In much of her work we see the landscape surrounding her homes in Midcoast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap, and the view out her Lower East Side loft. Dodd’s work is in major collections including Colby College Museum, Cooper-Hewitt, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. and Portland Museum of Art. Dodd is represented by Alexandre Gallery, New York.

Enrique Martínez Celaya (b. 1964) was trained as an artist as well as a physicist and currently works in painting, sculpture, photography and writing. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The State Hermitage Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden and the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig, Germany, among others.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor (b. 1972) has become well-known for reinvigorating the Renaissance craft of marquetry by combining wood veneer, painting and photography in unprecedented ways to create a new perspective on painting which she terms "marquetry hybrid." Her work is included in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Des Moines Art Center, Toledo Museum of Art and ASU Art Museum. In 2017, she installed Reclamation, a permanent installation at Cornell Tech, New York City. Taylor has received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and the Smithsonian's Artist Research Fellowship Program Award.

Working with equal curiosity and confidence in oils and watercolors, Matthew Wong (b. 1984) deploys a wide-ranging color, tonal and mark-making vocabulary to delineate psychological and metaphysical spaces at once familiar and uncannily strange. The use of planar space, contrast between wet and dry, as well as the application of dots and rudimentary marks in Chinese ink painting have influenced Wong’s conception of painting as an activity for mark-making and color application. The spaces in time created by Wong’s activity allow a world to emerge that has never existed but that seem familiar: landscapes, presences, lived environments, human existences are traversed and collectively form a map without boundaries.

This event is free but registration is required. Please RSVP here!

Landscape Painting Now book launch and panel discussion
Wednesday, April 17: 7PM
Whitney Shop
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St, New York City