Locks Gallery is pleased to present The Lure of Unknown Regions Beyond the Rim of Experience, a sequence of installations and new works by New York artist Rob Wynne. The exhibition will be on view December 6th, 2013 through January 30, 2014. There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, December 6th from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.
For his third exhibition at the gallery, Wynne will exhibit some of his most ambitious installations to date combining his signature mix of historical references and nature-inspired symbolism. While the work is highly controlled with virtuosic craftsmanship, there is a paradoxical wildness to their content and forms (embodied by his decision to work with hand-poured glass). Mixing baroque sensibilities with an edgy playfulness, Wynne complicates the sentiments and themes in his work with the highly artificial nature of the objects.
The Lure of Unknown Regions Beyond the Rim of Experience presents pieces embodying the classical elements. Wynne draws on both metaphoric associations (where butterflies represent air) and symbolic material choices (diamond dust rocks represent earth). Within this elemental framework, Wynne mashes up history and the fleeting present, creating objects that temper their own fragility with a powerful sense of time.
In the large glass wall piece, Wave (2013), Wynne fractures the iconic woodblocks of Japanese printmaker Hokusai (1760–1849) into a dazzling array of glass dots. Wynne continues to appropriate history by referencing imagery from the French painter Jean Restout (1692–1768) on a digitally printed canvas entitled Flame (2013). Despite these traces of the familiar, the artist poetically transforms his references into a surreal new world just beyond the rim of experience.
Rob Wynne (b. 1948) has had numerous solo exhibitions, including The Norton Art Museum, West Palm Beach; JGM Galerie, Paris; Galerie Edward Mitterand, Geneva; and Holly Solomon Gallery, New York. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the McNay Art Museum, TX; P.S.1 Institute for Contemporary Art, NY; Long Beach Museum of Art, CA; The Drawing Center, NY; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Wynne’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Centre Pompidou, France; The Norton Art Museum, FL; The Columbus Museum of Art, OH; and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris.
