May 15th, 2014 – June 1st, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, May 16th, 7-9pm
Hotel and Tree in Winter, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 40″
The Lodge Gallery proudly presents “Margins,” an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Frank Webster. Webster’s paintings depict post-industrial landscapes drawing on the aesthetic traditions of minimalism and realism. Summoning a sense of apocalyptic abandonedness, Webster’s compositions pair high-rise buildings with similarly scaled trees, liken barbed-wire fences and electrical wires to the creeping vines that entwine them, and present an urban ecosystem curiously devoid of inhabitants.
Grounded in reality, the paintings abstract the ordinary: the everyday world is made transcendent and strange, imbued with an ethereal and melancholy beauty. The sharp juxtaposition of built environments and romanticism are evocative of the moment in which we find ourselves presently. His work contemplates the paradox of this co-existence.
“Webster’s conveyance of physical and psychological isolation conjures the despair of Hopper’s solitary figures in spare settings, an impression reinforced by Webster’s palette of subdued grays, blues and yellows. The austere depiction of architecture echoes the deadpan cool of Ed Ruscha’s paintings of buildings, minus the ironic humor.” – Amanda Church, Art in America
Frank Webster is a painter who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Webster received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Webster is the recipient of numerous awards including the Pollock Krasner and the Golden Foundation Individual Artist Award. He has shown in solo and group exhibitions in New York at Blackston Gallery, Storefront Bushwick, Sara Meltzer Gallery and White Columns, among others. He has been awarded residencies at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, PS 122, Virginia Commonwealth University, The Ucross Foundation, The Corporation of Yaddo, The Ragdale Foundation and The MacDowell Colony.
