Caboose, oil on linen, 20" x 30", 2006
Caboose, oil on linen, 20" x 30", 2006
Margaret Thatcher Projects
511 West 25th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10001
212.675.0222
www.thatcherprojects.com
info@thatcherprojects.com
Margaret Thatcher Projects is pleased to announce William Steiger: Under a Telephone Pole, an exhibition of new paintings. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery and a catalogue with an essay by Bruce W. Ferguson and a statement by Richard Solomon has been published to mark the occasion. The exhibition, Under a Telephone Pole, pays homage to Carl Sandburg’s 1916 poem of the same title.
In his oil paintings, Steiger re-presents icons of the American landscape by reducing them to simplified, geometric shapes. Grain elevators, mills and railways are presented as free-floating triangles and parallelograms in bleached white, depopulated environments. The immaculate white surfaces function to occupy both positive and negative spaces, often signifying ground and sky within the same composition.
By employing a repertoire of recognizable images, Steiger is able to push his paintings to a new conceptual level. The removal of naturalistic elements, a shadow or a horizon line for example, and the more recent inclusion of unusually bright colors, where earthy hues used to dominate, test the boundaries of visual recognition. The artist’s focus on the absence of line and its function in the spectator’s perception of an image, are combined with a hard-edged, flat painting style in order to call attention to the constructed nature of visual language.
William Steiger has exhibited extensively nationally, including a solo show at the Queens Museum of Art, and internationally at the Gallery Ihn in Seoul, Korea. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the MoMA, the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in numerous private and corporate collections. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 am to 6 pm. For further information, please contact the gallery.
 Cooper Island (12x16) |
 River Bend (20x30) |
 Wheat Pool #6 (30x24) |
 Telephone Pole (10x8) |
 Blue Wonderwheel (60x48) |
 Wheat Pool #3 (30x24) |