|
Indepth Arts News:
"Walter King: BoMA's Inaugural Exhibition"
2006-09-28 until 2006-12-02
BoMA, Bar of Modern Art
Columbus, OH,
USA United States of America
BoMA Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of artworks by long-time CCAD Professor Walter King. In the recent past, King has exhibited throughout the U.S. as well as South America and Eastern Europe. BoMA now reintroduces Columbus to this local gem. The show will be on view in BoMA’s second-floor Hall Gallery from September 28 through December 2, 2006 as a part of BoMA inaugural exhibition series. Walter King has been a Premiere Portfolio Artist at absolutearts.com since 2001 and regularly writes an art blog for the site.
As evidenced by this current body of work, King’s artistic tastes are eclectic and adventurous.
He uses media considered more contemporary, such as auto primers, wall paper samples, toys, and a range of modern (even industrial) application techniques. At the same time, King’s knowledge of and appreciation for traditional techniques, such as collage, oil and acrylic painting, egg tempera and encaustic, are apparent.
King employs these techniques to explore contemporary issues, bringing uncomfortable social and political matters to the surface. He gains inspiration from history, travel, philosophy, existing art, spirituality, and oftentimes simply from people-watching. In Rain Forest, for example, King combines the inspirations of a flight over a South American rain forest and the song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday. Holiday sings, “Southern trees bear strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood on the root,” bemoaning the atrocities of early American lynching. Through this and other works, King reveals his endless opposition to intolerance and injustice. In Jenga, King’s wry humor is exposed. The viewer takes the seat of the artist in a late-night bar as he oversees a game similar to “Jenga,” yet played with a stack of miniature figurative forms. In this piece we see a sort of Post-Impressionistic genre scene, recalling the French Les Nabis, with a twist characteristic of King’s oeuvre.
In 1983, King designed and illustrated the award-winning graphics for “Profiles in American Art,” a twelve-part PBS series on contemporary American Regionalist painters and sculptors. His silkscreen peace poster titled A Second Sun hangs among the work of a select number of prominent American artists and designers in the Hiroshima Museum of Art. Most recently, King collaborated with poet Edward Lense to publish (Pudding House Publishing) a book of poems inspired by King’s “Interior Scenario” drawing series. Other works have recently been published in American Illustrators Annual # 23, The Journal of the Carl Jung Society of New York, and “Elastic Ekphrastic.”
View more of Walter King's work at http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/w/walterking.
IMAGE
Walter King
Title: Rain Forest
Year Created: 2002
Medium: Other Painting
Width: 48 inches
Height: 48 inches
Related Links:
| | 
|
