"Gordon Onslow Ford: Centennial Celebration"
Opens January 26th at Weinstein Gallery
383 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
weinstein.com
Exhibition reception January 26, 2013, 6–8pm;
preceded by a roundtable discussion at 4 pm
On view through February 23rd
Press contact: Kendy Genovese, 415-362-8151, kendy@weinstein.com
Weinstein Gallery is pleased to present "Gordon Onslow Ford: Centennial Celebration," a retrospective exhibition to kick-off a year-long celebration of what would have been the artist's one-hundredth birthday. The exhibition will take place at the gallery at 383 Geary Street, with the opening on Saturday January 26th from 6-8pm, preceded by an intimate roundtable discussion with Fariba Bogzaran, co-founder of the Lucid Art Foundation with Onslow Ford, and Peter Selz, former chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum.
The exhibition features over 60 works spanning the eight decades of Onslow Ford's remarkable career and is highlighted by a dozen paintings and works on paper from the personal collection of Elisabeth Onslow Ford, the artist's sister which were recently on loan to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina for the exhibition, Surrealism and Beyond. In addition, several major paintings from the permanent collection of the Lucid Art Foundation will be on display. A 56-page catalogue with an essay by Peter Selz accompanies the exhibition.
Onslow Ford was training as an officer for the British Royal Navy when his lifelong love of art making proved too strong, and he moved to Paris to pursue his desire to paint. He met André Breton, who saw in his work and that of his best friend Robert Matta, the Surrealist search for an understanding of subconscious using automatic means. During World War II, Onslow Ford was asked to come to New York to deliver a series of lectures on the Surrealist movement. These talks, which took place at the New School for Social Research in 1941, had a profound impact on a whole generation of young New York artists, including Jackson Pollock, Gerome Kamrowski, Jimmy Ernst, Robert Motherwell, and others. It was in New York that Onslow Ford made one of his masterpieces, Propaganda for Love, which is on view as part of this present exhibition.
Onslow Ford traveled with his new wife, Jacqueline Johnson, to Mexico, where they lived from 1941 till 1947 among the Tarascan Indians in an area west of Mexico City. The Indian's prioritization of nature, both in form and spirit, matched Onslow Ford's own, and this time saw an expansion of his spontaneous Surrealist gestures into more studied, measured map-like compositions depicting both natural and timeless geographies, as if seen from a bird's eye view. This mapping eventually resolved itself into simple geometries, and upon his move to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1947 would trigger his awareness of the primacy of the line, circle, and dot as the root forms of the universe. These works were shown soon upon his arrival in a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1949 and the Dynaton exhibition, with Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican, at the same museum in 1951.
The Bay Area (first San Francisco, then Sausalito and Mill Valley, and finally Inverness, near Point Reyes) proved to be the fertile environment that Onslow Ford needed to nurture his ongoing search for the inner worlds through the painting medium. Influenced by the gentle climate, the proximity to the sea, the influence of Asian art and calligraphy, and the spirited philosophical awareness that permeated the Bay Area and the people who were drawn to it, Onslow Ford found a perfect milieu in which to combine the rigor of his European training, the spontaneity of the Surrealists, and the lessons of nature. The result is five final decades of painting in which his evolution leaves the earthly and goes into the cosmic, never to return. The outer becomes inner, as the constellations of self manifest in the shared consciousness, stopping briefly to mark the canvases of Gordon Onslow Ford.
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