Charles Green Shaw: Idioms

PEYTON WRIGHT

Idioms Charles Green Shaw August 2 - September 3, 2013

Charles Green Shaw: Idioms August 2 – September 3, 2013

Peyton Wright Gallery | 237 East Palace Ave | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.9889 | info@peytonwright.com

Throughout his long career in the arts, Charles Green Shaw (1892-1974) was a vocal proponent of abstract painting, and according to New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, "a peripatetic, multitasking insider-outsider who pledged allegiance to Modernism but also played the field."

A New York City native, Shaw graduated from Yale in 1914 and completed a year of architectural studies at Columbia University.

Shaw initially worked as a journalist for publications like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, but he developed an abiding interest in painting during a three-year stay in Europe in the 1920s, when he visited the studios of Arp, Braque, Picasso, and others on the forefront of avant-garde art.

Idioms consists of paintings from the decade between 1960s and 1970s. Reductive and bold, Shaw made them at the peak of his artistic powers and prowess—a point in his career when the artist returned to his hard-edged style of the 1930s and incorporated elements of 1960s Minimalism. The works included evince a unified palette— oftentimes just two or three colors; in many of them, areas of subtle texture engage the viewer and heighten compositional contrast. Solid circles and rings are repeated thematically across many of the canvases, and angular polygons are a dominating motif as well, rendered in jagged or spoked iterations. These pared-down elements occur to the viewer as cunningly deliberate and effortlessly sophisticated, qualities wonderfully intensified in many of the works by the unusual addition of surface texture.

A Loud Day Dawns Oil on Canvas 1969 50 x 40 inches

Black into Yellow Oil on Canvas 1970 50 x 40 inches

Circle Divided Oil on Canvas 1970 50 x 40 inches

Flight in Space Oil on Canvas 1968 40 x 50 inches

High Noon

Oil on Canvas 1969 50 x 40 inches

Interior No. 2 Oil on Canvas 1966 35x 30 inches

Opened Circle Oil on Canvas 1970 39.5 x 32 inches

Polygon in Space Oil on Canvas 1969 40 x 30 inches

Samurai

Oil on Canvas 1960 30 x 22 inches

Solitaire

Oil on Canvas 1967 48 x 36 inches

Suspension in Space No. 2 Oil on Canvas 1960 22 x 30 inches Signed Lower Left

Symphony in Gray, Yellow and Black Oil on Canvas 1969 50 x 40 inches

The Dark Beyond (Interior No. 1) Oil on Canvas 1966 22 x 30 inches

Black on White Against Yellow Oil on Canvas 1968 50 x 40 inches

Sentinel

Oil on Canvas 1969 50 x 40 inches

Untitled (Century Show Abstraction) Oil on Canvas 1969 20 x 16 inches

237 East Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, NM 87501 800.879.8898 / 505.989.9888 info@peytonwright.com www.peytonwright.com