John Wesley
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of John Wesley’s Bumstead paintings (1974 to present). Appropriating the classic Chic Young characters of Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead, Wesley has created a remarkably prescient body of work whose subject is no less than the American psyche. While many artists of his generation have used the popular image to explore the cultural landscape, Wesley has employed a comic-strip style and a compositional rigor to make deeply personal, often hermetic paintings that strike at the core of our most primal fears, joys, and desires.
As Linda Norden writes in Parkett #62:
“The Bumstead paintings — whether detailing scenes of domestic misunderstanding, zooming in on off-camera moments of bafflement, or simply scanning empty halls and walls for private memories — are excruciatingly specific representations of the gulfs between feeling and comprehension… smart, funny, startling, irreverently empathetic, and often heartbreaking, they are a welcome antidote to more laborious discourse.”
This is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on this major series. Thirteen paintings will be on view, including the first canvas in the group, The Bumsteads (1974), on loan from the Donald Judd Foundation, and the most recent work, Bumstead and Dead Geisha (2006), completed in December of the same year. A hardcover catalogue with an essay by Robert Hobbs will accompany the exhibition.
About the Artist:
John Wesley (b. 1928) has had numerous one-person museum exhibitions including PS1/MoMA, New York; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; Haus Lange, Krefeld; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Portikus, Frankfurt. A permanent installation of his paintings is on view at Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. Recent group exhibitions include Full House, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; After Cézanne, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Funny Cuts: Cartoons and Comics in Contemporary Art, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. He has had solo gallery exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery, London; Tomio Koyama, Tokyo; and Zwirner & Wirth, New York. Wesley was the 2005 recipient of the Skowhegan Medal for Painting and the flagship artist for The Armory Show in 2006. This is his seventh solo exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser.
