Thursday 11 November 2010 Rackstraw Downes exhibition to move to Portland Museum of Art
The first major survey of paintings by contemporary artist Rackstraw Downes, Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008, will be on view at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, December 16, 2010 through March 20, 2011. It features more than 30 major works ranging from Downes’ earliest en plein air paintings executed in Maine to his later signature views of the New York City skyline and the vast panoramas near his home in Presidio, Texas.
Organized by the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, the exhibition features Downes’ minutely detailed panoramic paintings of the American land-and urbanscape from 1972 to 2008. The exhibition traces the artist’s career through major examples of his work painted in Maine, Texas, New Jersey, and New York, including two haunting depictions of the untenanted interior spaces in the World Trade Center in 1998.
Rejecting picturesque views characteristic of much realist work, his landscapes depict scenes generally overlooked or dismissed for lack of a traditional aesthetic appeal. His subjects range from the roadways, urban detritus, and industrial backyards of the East Coast to the oil fields and vast, empty scrubland of Texas. In painting the American landscape as it is, not as it has been idealized, Downes imbues seemingly ordinary subjects with extraordinary power.
Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008 will travel to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (May 28-August 21, 2011).
Visit the Portland Museum of Art at : http://www.portlandmuseum.org/
Rackstraw Downes
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