John Wilde - Love & Death
December 3 - 31, 2022
Tory Folliard Gallery celebrates the work of Wisconsin artist John Wilde with Love and Death, an exhibition of his paintings and drawings from 1940-2005.
John Wilde’s work constantly balances life with death. These elements were most frequently integrated, side-by-side, or embodied through objects or figures betraying one foot in ecstasy and the other in the tomb. His attention to their embrace comes through the ripeness of fruits and inquisitiveness of insects from his garden, runs through the flight of birds and their songs, is overlaid upon his reflection, hides in the smile of frolicking naked ladies, and rests in the crisp glow of talismanic objects.
-- Robert Cozzolino
John Wilde (1919-2006) was a leader in the American surrealism movement known as Magic Realism. He was a consummate draftsman employing Renaissance painting and drawing techniques in his compositions. He was known for his beautiful and bizarre subject matter, and his adoration of the natural world. Wilde's ideas of life and death interact contrapuntally, or, as Wilde put it more bluntly, "from sex to the awareness of death."
Wilde's work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Walker Art Center, Art Institute of Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Portland Art Museum, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others.
The Tory Folliard Gallery has represented John Wilde's art since 1993.
Catalog with essay by Robert Cozzolino will accompany this exhibition.