Including artists, Christiane Baumgartner, Christopher Beane, Mel Bochner, Long-Bin Chen, Jeff Chyatte, Lin Emery, Rinaldo Frattolillo, Charlie Hewitt, Jasper Johns, Jay Kelly, Manuel Knapp, Suzanne Levesque, Jerry Mischak, David Mitchell, Jacob Ouillette, Robert Petersen, Jenna Pirello, Robert Rauschenberg, Kevin Scott, Boaz Vaadia, Jim Watt, Stanley Whitney and more!

Known for rendering decadent and pristinely organized desserts, Wayne Thiebaud is a seminal artist in post-war American art, lying at the vanguard of Pop Art and modern realism. The exhibit is intended as a small-scale retrospective of Wayne Thiebaud’s prints, showcasing his trademark subject - American food- along with his images of San Francisco’s urban landscapes. Thiebaud was thoroughly interested in the beauty of print media, and the elements of chance, surprise, and continuity that existed in the practice. This exhibition showcases the editioned and hand-colored trial proofs that came out of his well-crafted investigations into various print practices. Print media was used as a platform for Thiebaud to explore the possibilities of transfiguration, and the idea that a work of art is never truly complete. In printmaking, a trial proof or artist proof allows the artist to explore different compositional decisions and color palette (known as a color trial proof). Thiebaud described this process by saying “It is the potential for change that captivates me. Trial proofs offer a chance to experiment with variations and permutations that can be transmitted to the next stage.” Applying a layer of watercolor or pastel over a print encourages a direct freshness and gives new life to the images. Thiebaud relishes the ability to rework an image and the struggle to find the point at which an image is truly resolved.

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Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of prints by Wayne Thiebaud from November 1st through December 8, 2001. The show will include a selection of some of the artist’s best etchings, aquatints, linocuts and woodcuts from 1962 to the present. The gallery is located at 501 West 23rd Street. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6.

Celebrated for his carefully observed images of cakes, pies, toys and lipsticks, Wayne Thiebaud’s prints have been an important part of the artist’s oeuvre since the early 1964 “Delights” portfolio of tiny incisive etchings of commonplace American still-life objects - a restaurant tabletop dispensers, a plate of olives, a display of stately cake wedges, a can of sardines. Later images of rabbits and lollipops were followed by San Francisco cityscapes like “Steep Street” in which the city’s verticality is extended into flat pattern. In his etchings and aquatints, such as the stunning “Four Cakes,” and the extraordinary Japanese woodcuts like the darkly luminous “Candy Apples,” Thiebaud gives weight and presence to passing pleasures and to ephemeral qualities of light and shadow.

There was a retrospective of Wayne Thiebaud’s prints at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. earlier this year. The Whitney Museum in New York and The Phillips Collection in Washington had major retrospectives of his paintings and drawings this year as well.

For more information please contact us at 212-206-6872 or info@jimkempner.com

AGAINST THE GRAIN

Woodcuts

AT JIM KEMPNER FINE ART

September 10 - September 30, 1998

Jim Kempner Fine Art will present Against the Grain, an exhibition of woodcuts by Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Wayne Thiebaud, Donald Judd, Alex Katz and others from September 10 through September 30, 1998. The gallery is located at 501 West 23rd Street (on Tenth Avenue). Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6pm; and Sundays from 12-5 pm.

Featured in Against The Grain, will be Tales of Genji II, from Helen Frankenthaler's recent print project with Tyler Graphics. Dated 1998, it is a woodcut and stencil on handmade paper in an edition of 36. An exquisite series of prints, Frankenthaler has distinctly stepped outside the ukiyo-e tradition inspired by the Japanese novel of the same title written in the 11th century.

Other highlights include The Student, 1980, by Roy Lichtenstein, a vibrant portrait from his series inspired by the vocabulary of German Expressionism;

and the a woodcut series of rich and intensely colored grids by Donald Judd, Untitled, 1992-93.

For further information or photographs, please contact the gallery at (212) 206-6872.