HOWARD BUCHWALD April 22 through May 16, 2006
The paintings in Buchwald's 2001 show at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery were intimately scaled works that involved a density of incident. Like intricate chamber works, they were meant to draw the viewer in and to elicit close scrutiny. More symphonic, the paintings in the current show are large and expansive, immediate in their impact, and masterful in the simplicity of their handling. They are built out of innumerable drawing decisions involving the distribution, direction, movement and grouping of color. In each case a complex web of relationships is constructed from a distinct and limited palette. Colors are adjusted to each other in terms of their weight, intensity, value and effect and are arrived at in the process of painting. In no instance is the work preconceived or the relationships worked out in advance. The range of compositional possibilities is explored further in a large number of intense, richly worked and very physical colored pencil drawings.		Howard Buchwald, Benton's Edge, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 120 inches
This exhibition has been selected from recent work and highlights the core of Buchwald’s current thinking, explorations, and concerns, concentrating on the most monumental of the paintings and some of the most powerful of the drawings. The elements of both the drawings and paintings--the runs of color, the intensity of the hues, the shapes and the rhythms--are specific, concrete and knit tightly together in an elusive interplay of changing relationships whose effect is one of openness and generosity of feeling. By means of its visual structure, Buchwald's new work slows an easy reading and engages the viewer by challenging passive looking and received notions of external "content." With each glance everything shifts and the overall composition resists being "held." The act of looking is embodied and the sensation is physical. The viewer becomes a necessary and integral part of the terms of engagement with the work’s content and completes the painting or drawing without closing the work. Buchwald's paintings and drawings invite fresh encounters by refusing limits of any kind.		Howard Buchwald, Houston Street Slant, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 91 x 137 inches
Howard Buchwald was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943. He received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union in 1964 and an M.A. from Hunter College in 1972. He was awarded the Elizabeth Foundation Grant; Pollock-Krasner Grant; Guggenheim Fellowship; CAPS (Creative Artists Program Services); and was twice awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The artist's work has been shown at The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; The Art Museum, Princeton University, New Jersey; Bayly Art Museum of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, Massachusetts; The Hudson River Museum of Westchester, Yonkers, New York; Hunter College, New York; Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota; The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.		Howard Buchwald, Side to Side, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 109 x 143 inches
His work is included in the collections of William Benton Museum, University of Connecticut, Storrs ; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science, Indiana ; Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; Gulbenkian Foundation; Lannan Foundation, Palm Beach; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts; Miami-Dade Community College Art Gallery, Florida; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Library, New Haven, Connecticut.		Howard Buchwald, Grabbing at Air, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 109 x 143 inches
Howard Buchwald, Untitled B, 2005, colored pencil on paper, 22 x 30 inches		Howard Buchwald, Untitled II, 2006, colored pencil on paper, 22 x 30 inches
Howard Buchwald, Untitled I, 2006, colored pencil on paper, 22 x 30 inches		Howard Buchwald, Drawing L, 2005 colored pencil on paper, 22 x 30 inches
Howard Buchwald, White, 2006, colored pencil on paper, 36 inches diameter		Howard Buchwald, Untitled XIX, 2006 colored pencil on paper, 27 x 27 inches
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