“These processes of plowing, planting, cultivating, and harvesting are very similar to my processes of layering, defining, obscuring. [...] I’m fueled by the “beat” of the paint application which is almost like a sowing or chopping rhythm. It’s a kind of primitive language about the nature of things.” –Warren Rohrer, 1975
Locks Gallery is pleased to present Warren Rohrer: Return to Land, an exhibition revisiting the artist’s relationship to his rural Pennsylvania upbringing and his evolution as a painter from landscapes to abstraction. This show coincides with the exhibition Warren Rohrer: Place On Paper on view at the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from November 2, 2024 to January 5, 2025.
Rohrer’s relationship to nature is a central theme in his paintings. “I learned to think about the landscape as being a message bearer… [...] something about the nature of forces greater than I am. [...] I’m in a sense an activator and a carrier of these forces that have been going all around me,” he said in 1989. The artist’s painting practice was deeply Informed by his Lancaster Mennonite upbringing, eventually drawing parallels between processes of painting and agriculture. Linear rows of brush strokes and his laborious, repetitive mark-making evoke processes of plowing, planting, harvesting, and tending to the land.
Paintings in this exhibition span from the late 1960s to early 1990s and demonstrate Rohrer’s evolving methodology of color and mark-making. Inspired by painters such as van Gogh, who layered muted colors over vibrant underpaintings, Rohrer’s meticulous layering transformed muted colors into luminous fields, evoking subtle changes of light in the landscape and sky. He described the function color as a passage, allowing the viewer to move through shadow and light in a painting as they would through physical space.
In a way, Rohrer’s painting process was an attempt to acknowledge or become aware of the messages embedded in the land. Rather than creating portraits or impressions of landscapes, he sought to understand the relational and subjective significance of the natural world. Nature, as he put it, “offers different answers and is always fluid, always on the way and never arriving.” Echoing this in a 1981 artist statement for Marian Locks Gallery, he wrote about the transcendent nature of his painting process: “going somewhere and not necessarily getting there.”
Warren Rohrer (1927–1995) has been recognized as one of Philadelphia’s leading abstract painters of the 20th century and was a renowned figure in the painting and teaching community in Philadelphia during his lifetime. He was the subject of a retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003 and was featured in Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer at the Palmer Museum of Art in 2021. His work is in many museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The National Gallery of Art, The Phillips Collection, and the Denver Art Museum, among others. Locks Gallery has represented the artist and his estate since 1974.
This exhibition will be on view in the first floor gallery and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 10am – 6pm.
