2022 In review
reflecting on our 2022 exhibitions
Since 1989, Bill Lowe Gallery has advanced the work of regional, national, and international artists alike in the evolving Atlanta arts scene. The Gallery has remained unequivocal in its commitment to reflect Atlanta's emergence as an epicenter of art, science, and technology through a kinetic dialogue with artists and audiences, both locally and globally.
During this past year, Bill Lowe Gallery presented a series of solo exhibitions under the theme Foundations. Each exhibition in the Foundations series accentuated gallery artists whose practice and work exemplify the enduring values of its mission and vision. Taking on new meaning and resonance in our current cultural climate, this series included exhibitions that distinctly explored themes of our collective history, anthropology, archeology, spirituality, philosophy, psychology, and biology.
FRANK HYDER
POET OF A THREATENED EDEN
March 26th - April 30th, 2022
Poet of a Threatened Eden presented a comprehensive survey of works by American multi-disciplinary artist, Frank Hyder. This retrospective focused on works created from 1986 through 2022 and featured Hyder’s hand-carved, scored, engraved, and painted works on wood and other media, ranging in scale from monumental to intimate.
Hyder’s works depict a ceremonial reverence for nature, and function as reliquaries that facilitate emotional bonds to the natural world - a world that is often forgotten, ignored, and abused. Each function as an altarpiece in organic cathedrals composed of the earth’s great forests, rivers, and mountains – from the Americas to Europe and Africa. Hyder’s work is noted for its enigmatic light sources, which are achieved through a dense layering of media that conveys the rich materiality and sensuality of the organic universe, and our spiritual connection to it.
STEVEN SEINBERG
THE THIRD BOOK ON LIGHT AND SHADE
May 6th - June 11th, 2022
In this most recent body of work, The Third Book on Light and Shade, American painter Steven Seinberg advanced an almost three-decade-long exploration of the forces of nature and their cellular connection to our psychic equilibrium. What was once tranquil and undisturbed in earlier iterations, has now become marred with an investigation into the essential qualities and forms – the birth – of light and shade. In his Third Book on Light and Shade, from which this exhibition received its title, Leonardo Da Vinci wrote “Shadow is diminution of light. Darkness is absence of light.” In response, Seinberg produced starkly split canvases – both a periphery where darkness emerges from light and vice versa – articulating what Leonardo Da Vinci theorized to be primary and derived shadow.
JIMMY O'NEAL
ABOUT NOW: AN INTROSPECTIVE
August 26th - October 2nd, 2022
A quasi-retrospective, About Now: An Introspective presented new paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations alongside remastered earlier works by Jimmy O’Neal. The exhibition created an immersive platform for a central theme from throughout the artist's three-decade career: the exposure of the thin membranes that exist between our experiences of reality. O'Neal articulated this most effectively through the application of his self-engineered, lens-based mark-making.
Over the years, O’Neal’s scientific mindset has led him to innovate in both the materials and processes that guide his practice. For instance, the mirrored acrylic painting technique he created during the late 1990s spoke to the legacy of other contemporary artists, like Michelangelo Pistoletto, who used the mirror as a strategy for inviting the viewer’s participation. However, in O’Neal’s case, it is within the mirrored lens paint itself that he made each one of us an active component of his intricate compositions constructed with expressive, highly textured, and overlapping abstract traces. In another grouping of works, the artist incorporated technological tools into his creative process through his “brain-machine” constructed to “paint” the artist’s brain waves and eye motion resulting from external stimuli.
TODD MURPHY
WINK
October 7th - November 4th, 2022
The first posthumous exhibition of renowned artist Todd Murphy (1962 - 2020), Wink featured sculpture, photography, painting, and mixed media from Todd Murphy’s Wink series (2010-2019). “Wink” is an affectionate nickname for James ‘Jimmy’ Winkfield, a champion jockey whose career began in 1898 at age sixteen. The son of former slaves, Jimmy quickly rose to fame and became a major success in horseracing after winning the Kentucky Derby consecutively in 1901 and 1902. Primarily due to segregation and shifts in the reputation of the sport, his career in the U.S. was short-lived and he moved to Europe for more promising opportunities. He was the last Black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby.
MICHAEL DAVID
THE MIRROR STAGE
November 11th, 2022 - January 7th, 2023
In the final exhibition of the year, Bill Lowe Gallery presented an exhibition of new works by New York artist Michael David titled The Mirror Stage. In his latest series, David returned to the themes and essence of his breakthrough Symbol Paintings shown at the legendary Sidney Janis Gallery in 1981. As if shattering the quantum fields of Pollock, the way Pollock shattered the innovation of Cézanne, David redefined the use of surface and action "painting" with personal narratives that also speak to the complexity of our contemporary lives.
In this new body of work, including A Day In The Life (titled after The Beatles’ masterpiece from Sargent Pepper) and Vanitas (The Man Who Fell to Earth II) (after the 1976 film by Nicolas Roeg starring David Bowie), David built his paintings with hundreds of pounds of broken mirror. In doing so, he achieved a complex yet seamless synthesis of his work over the last four decades. By pushing the boundaries between painting and sculpture, David embedded a singular narrative, as evidenced in his early shaped symbol paintings that used the Cross, the Swastika, and the Five Point Jewish Star, to his more recent masterworks such as The Inevitable and End of the World As We Know It.
