February 2008, Philadelphia, PA – An exhibition of new paintings by Thomas Chimes will be on view at Locks Gallery from April 4 through 30, 2008. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Friday, April 4, 2008 from 5:30 to 7:30pm. Gallery admission is free and open to the public.
In his first exhibition following the 2007 career retrospective, Thomas Chimes: Adventures in ‘Pataphysics, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Chimes will be exhibiting new works that continue to reflect his diverse interests in alchemy, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, astronomy, the writing of Alfred Jarry, and Greek poetry in the form of celestial, white and gold paintings.
The Locks Gallery exhibition will include suites of twenty-five miniature panel paintings. Chimes groups the works as grids to read like visual poems in an iambic verse. Looking to the last line of Finnegan’s Wake, “ A way a lone a last a loved a long the”, Chimes, like Joyce, employs a quantitative rhythm to create tragic effect.
In the catalog essay for the retrospective, curator Michael Taylor writes that Chimes has a, “uniquely contemporary approach to the work of his intellectual and artistic forebears, using their exploits and energy to their revolutionary concepts and ideas by updating them through his current interests . . .” This can be seen in the numerous panel paintings of the past decade and in the new ideas expressed in the Iambic paintings.
With a career spanning over five decades, Chimes’ work is in the collections of such museums as the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Corcoran Museum of Art, D.C.; the Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; the Yale University Art Gallery, CT; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA. He has exhibited at institutions such as The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; The Insitute of Contemporary Art, PA; and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX.
