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March 9 – April 15, 2006
Opening Reception
Thursday, March 9,2006 6 – 9 pm
Tim Isham and Stanley Dorfman, whose art making careers span more than 40 years. This exhibition looks back at the early work these two artists, who like so many others, relied on other jobs to pay the bills while they operated outside of the trend setting eye of the art world. The important issues that they probed in their art resonates today to contribute a dialogue to younger artists, and to the primacy of painting in contemporary practice.
Stanley Dorfman began making art in the late 1940’s. Dorfman was part of the Penworth Society of Arts in St. Ives and took part in group exhibitions at the Redfern gallery in London. Dorfman’s early work was in line with Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson who wanted to apply 'constructivist' principles to public and private art, advocating mathematical precision, clean lines and an absence of ornament.Dorfman’s earliest works followed and upheld this Modernist Philosophy. But in a very short time Dorfman’s paintings became freer and more playful, with structures of color dancing like pieces of a modern building that were magically held together by the hand of the artist. This musicality progressed in Dorfman’s work while maintaining the drawn lines of Modernism. These lines became the substructure of Dorfman’s work, which he now uses to contain planes of color like a stain glass window that references itself as a direct descendant of Modernism.
Tim Isham’s paintings from 1967 to 1970 focus on surrealism and it’s relationship to abstraction. The color fields hint at figures while defining a space that are both painted and drawn, employing calligraphic gestures that summon Isham’s personal and subconscious imagery into a collision of worlds that are fused with sexuality. The paintings are a haunting precursor to the Japanese pop of the 1990’s with a plasticity embedded in the fractured fields that are drawn with a brush into action, serving as the idea for abstraction, making abstraction the subject. Tim Isham’s paintings from the late 1960’s address the issues of postmodernism before that all-too-familiar term existed.
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