This show exhibits work executed over three decades. Thompson confesses it is an indulgence, motivated in part by his advanced age but also by a curiosity and desire to see in a gallery setting how the work hangs [or not] together. Beginning with his hard edged, geometric paintings of the 80s, h... Read more
This show exhibits work executed over three decades. Thompson confesses it is an indulgence, motivated in part by his advanced age but also by a curiosity and desire to see in a gallery setting how the work hangs [or not] together. Beginning with his hard edged, geometric paintings of the 80s, he moves into the tangled and buried geometric frameworks of the following decade to the still geometric but deliberately bland lay out of the nine rectangles of the 00s. The earlier works he refers to as double lines. The work in the 90s he calls over/under and the more recent body of work he has named nine of them.
Finding ways to make paint and form spell out their own identities is his continuing goal. Thompson identifies himself most deeply with the New York school of painters of the fifties and sixties. The various endeavors of those painters to make pure form and color achieve expressive ends is an endlessly fascinating and exciting problem for him. He develops his own strategies for letting the materials of his art express their own nature, free of obligations to other levels of meaning.
Thompson has been a member of Amos Eno since 2000. This is his fifth exhibition with the gallery. He is a retired teacher of art and art history. He has published over ninety art reviews, articles and essays for various publications, mostly Art in America. He has also written a book on Paul Cézanne, a new edition which is due out in early 2012.
