JAMES BISHOP - Malerei auf Papier / Paintings on Paper

JAMES BISHOP (1927-)

James Bishop is an American artist who has lived in France since 1958. His exquisitely rendered, relatively rare drawings and paintings—which American poet and art critic John Ashbery once called “part air, part architecture”—combine European and American traditions of postwar art. His approach is marked by a poetic, reductionist tendency in which he creates form through color alone. Inflected by subtle shading relationships and a geometry that abandons the hard-edge abstraction used by many of his contemporaries, his work is grounded in the physical process of painting and in the interplay of color.

 
James Bishop. Tree I, n.d. Private collection.

In the mid-1960s, Bishop painted his first large-format square paintings. He divided the pictures, which measure nearly six foot square, into progressively smaller planes—halves, quarters, and eighths. By pouring thinned oil paint and tilting the canvases, Bishop controlled the flow of paint into these drawn guidelines, achieving subtle structure within veils of finely saturated pigment. Some of these paintings evidence architectural structure suggestive of a house or building. In 1986, the artist stopped working with large-scale canvas in favor of small paper supports.

This Focus exhibition brings together a small group of paintings and roughly 100 works on paper from the artist’s personal collection as well as from private collections in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. It is the first substantial selection of Bishop’s work to be seen outside of Europe.

Organizer: This exhibition was organized at the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, and Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany,