Feature Articles


May Issue 2002

Weatherspoon Museum of Art in Greensboro, NC, Features Exhibitions by Tom Knechtel and Stephen Dean

An exhibition of paintings and drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Tom Knechtel is premiering at the Weatherspoon Art Museum and will continue through July 14, 2002. During the same time frame, the Museum is also presenting the exhibition, Stephen Dean: Pulse, on view in Gallery 6.

Tom Knechtel

On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theatre of Tom Knechtel is a mid-career survey of Knechtel's work from 1976 to 2001. Knechtel creates magical oil paintings and drawings that combine scrupulous technique with various inspirations ranging from puppet shows, Kabuki theatre, fairy tales, zoological prints, and the work of earlier artists such as William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch. Despite such exotic and far-flung sources, Knechtel's works are grounded in his own personal experience at the same time they invite the viewer's own interpretation.

Known for a technical virtuosity and for the range of his works on paper, Knechtel has explored the media of watercolor, gouache, pastel, charcoal, silverpoint, graphite, and ink, in each case keeping a pure relationship between method and mark-making. In 1985, he began to paint in oils in a desire to loosen up his precise and meticulous technique. The phantasmagoric works that resulted set forth intricate and meandering narratives, which delight the viewer with a labyrinth of private fantasy and stylized, colorful spectacle.

With a flurry of activity and exquisite detail, Knechtel invites viewers to step up for a closer look at his imaginary terrains. In an e-mail interview with writer and art critic Benjamin Weissman, Knechtel explains, "I think my obsession with miniature comes from several things. I love toys, and when a kid, I made stuffed animals that were very small, with their own clothing, relishing the diminutive scale. The intimacy of that and of objects like illuminated manuscripts, the way they make the viewer tune out the larger world and just focus on this tiny presentation, that fascinates me. I also like the idea of the scale of a picture going from (relatively) large to extremely tiny, so that it seems to contain an entire world in itself, slowing down the viewer's tendency to skim pictures quickly."

The exhibition is comprised of twenty-four oil paintings and approximately seventy works on paper representing a wide range of media and subject matter. Also included will be Two Allegories, a 1983-84 single edition book which further evolved an iconography of unruly passion and animistic spirituality for which Knechtel is well known. On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theatre of Tom Knechtel is intended to define the artist's unique voice, and to show that Knechtel's aesthetic sophistication, multicultural interests, and literary/theatrical sensibility are quite relevant to a broad contemporary consciousness.

Accompanying the exhibition is a splendid 128-page hard cover catalogue, which includes sixty color images, twenty-one black and white plates and essays by Ron Platt, Weatherspoon Curator of Exhibitions, and Anne Ayers, Director of Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design. The catalogue also includes a prose piece by Benjamin Weissman; a commissioned poem by Pulitzer-prize winner Richard Howard; and a poem that was dedicated to the artist by Los Angeles writer Amy Gerstler.

In addition, a video interview with the artist will be available for viewing in the gallery throughout the exhibition.

Knechtel was born in Palo Alto, CA, in 1952. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the City of Los Angeles Grant Recipients show last year at the Skirball Art Museum; The Luckman Fine Arts Complex in Los Angeles; The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena; and The Drawing Center in New York. He has had recent solo exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum; PPOW Gallery in New York; and Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles.

Knechtel was selected to participate in the 36th Art on Paper exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Nov. 19, 2000 - Jan. 14, 2001). His work, Young Pig, 2000, pastel on paper, was acquired from Art On Paper for the Weatherspoon's Dillard Collection and is included in this nationally touring exhibition.

Special programming for the Tom Knechtel exhibition will include a series of classic films to be shown on Weds. evenings at 7pm in the Weatherspoon auditorium. Admission to all films is free and the public is invited. Films are not rated. Parental guidance is recommended.

On May 15 at 7pm - Fabulous Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1965) - A masterpiece of animation by Czechoslovakian director, Karel Zeman D, this fabulous film mixes live action, antique engravings, and animation
in a dazzling tour-de-force of fantasy, and is regarded as one of the great works of the cinema. English. (75min).

On June 12 at 7pm - Amarcord (1974) - Federico Fellini's nostalgic, fantastic, and funny reminiscence of growing up in the town of Rimini. Against the comic background are sets of indelible characters, fantastical images, and an omnipresent Fascist state. Italian with subtitles. (127min).

On June 26 at 7pm - The Emperor's Nightingale (1948) - One of the great names in puppet animation, Jiri Trnka is often referred to as the Disney of Eastern Europe. Based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, this stop-motion animation mixes puppets with live-action. English. (70 min.).

On July 11, at 7pm - The Brothers Quay - Masters of stop-motion animation, the Brothers Quay are best known for their miniaturization, haunting imagery, and surrealist worlds. Familiar to MTV and popular culture, the Quays have created animated films since the early 80s. A selection of film shorts will be shown including "Street of Crocodiles". (60min.).

On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theatre of Tom Knechtel was curated by Anne Ayres, organized by the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, and initiated and sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The Museum is also presenting the exhibition, Stephen Dean: Pulse, in Gallery 6, on view through July 28, 2002.

Stephen Dean is a young French-American artist now living in New York. His work spans various mediums, including video, sculpture, and drawing. Pulse is a riveting and painterly video, which incorporates footage gathered by Dean during the festival of Holi in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. This festival marks the arrival of Spring, when people throng the streets to douse one another with colored powders, water, and glitter until the streets become small rivers of glistening color.

Dean was born in 1968 in Paris, and now lives and works in New York. He has spent time observing the religious and secular rituals that are embedded in Indian culture. Dean has exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe, and his work is held in many private, corporate, and public collections, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, the collection of Banque Société Générale, and the Progressive Corporation. One of his drawings, Untitled (Help Wanted Half Page), 1994, was given to the Weatherpoon's collection last year by Werner and Sarah-Ann Kramarsky and is included in the current exhibition, A Way with Words.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at 336/334-5770, or on the web at (www.weatherspoon.uncg.edu).

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