16 December 2007 – 24 February 2008

JAMES BISHOP - WORKS ON PAPER. - HOMAGE TO HIS 80th BIRTHDAY

To mark the 80th birthday of the American painter James Bishop, who has been living close to Paris since 1958, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung is showing a selection of his works on paper.

From the early 1980s onwards, James Bishop produced his oil paintings increasingly on small-sized paper instead of large-scale canvas. Ever since the Sixties, Bishop’s gentle and carefully structured painting, which gained early acclaim from leading critics on both sides of the Atlantic, lived from the tension between solid, scaffold-like under-drawing and the flow of colours blurring the structure.
To this day, the paint is applied in thin layers that act like a glaze, thus creating the impression of transparency to the colours on the painting ground. Whereas previously Bishop tended to use stronger colours, he later turned increasingly to earth colours - shades of ochre, brown and grey in their subtle tonal relationships. The barely noticeable style that characterises Bishop’s use of brush or pencil has a stillness of both movement and emotion peculiar to this artist.

To begin with, it was primarily the generation of American artists immediately before him - in particular Rothko, Gorky, Newman, Reinhard and Motherwell - who served as a model for Bishop’s oeuvre and dominated his commitment to abstraction. By contrast, his life in Europe led to a growing interest in the Italian Renaissance and a deeper affinity with the culture of French painting as practised by such artists as Vuillard or Bonnard, and also to the intellectual spirit of Morandi.

Particularly in the narrowly confined pictorial space of his paintings on paper, rarely more than the size of an outstretched hand, Bishop succeeds in creating one lyrical miracle after the other through the utmost intensity and sublimation of form, light and colour. Despite Bishop’s reserved nature and position outside the mainstream of the international art world - one he chose for himself decades ago - the artist has shaped the Seventies generation of abstract French painters in a quiet, yet all the more emphatic way.

This is only the second time a German museum is holding an exhibition of James Bishop’s work - almost fifteen years after the presentations in the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Westfälische Landesmuseum Münster.

Address

Josef Albers Museum - Quadrat Bottrop
Im Stadtgarten 20
46236 Bottrop
phone +49 2041 297 16
http://www.quadrat-bottrop.de

Opening Hours

Daily 10 a.m. - 6 p.m., closed on Monday.

Within 10 days
starting exhibitions
ending exhibitions