NEW YORK, NY.- Marlborough Gallery announces the opening of an exhibition of recent work by Bill Jacklin entitled, New York Paintings which opened on February 12 and continues through March 15, 2014.
The exhibition is comprised of approximately twenty oil paintings of various landmarks and scenes of New York, themes that have inspired the artist since his arrival to the city in 1985. The works offer an intimate rendering of a place, an atmosphere, a moment; they articulate the primacy of observation and experience. Jacklin writes:
Almost all my paintings have become concerned with the passing of time and my place in it. I respond to the sea and the stars at night, the illuminations over the Great Lawn in Central Park and the road with shadows with birds flying above me. I have watched the skaters at the Wollman Rink forming patterns with their silhouettes and shadows against the ice and I have seen the clouds passing over me with their shapes against the sun. The seemingly fast track of the seasons is almost cinematic as the sunbathers relaxing in the park suddenly are bent against the wind and snow as they cross the street in New York City.
These works are a manifestation of how the artist renders the city as ever-new by capturing the subtle, ephemeral elements of a particular place: light, movement and time. Jacklins works are imbued with a swirling, lyrical movement and converging forces that involve chance encounters of one kind or another. Through a seductive palette of burnished colors Jacklin creates paintings that are on the one hand playful and on the other serve as a battleground, or dance, of dark and light forms. These paintings attest to the gestural and chromatic sensibility of the artist; they embody a perspective of quietude that transcends the scene and the location depicted.
In 1989, the British-born artist was elected Associate Member of the Royal Academy, London (ARA) and in 1991, Royal Academician. In 1992 he had a retrospective exhibition, Urban Portraits, 1986-1992, at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford which traveled to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In 1993 he spent three months in Hong Kong as the British Councils first artist-in-residence. He was commissioned by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority to do a mural size painting, six by twenty-four feet, for the new terminal designed and overseen by Cesar Pelli, Associates for Washington National Airport in 1997. Most recently, in the fall of 2013, Marlborough Fine Art in London held a very well-received exhibition of Jacklins recent paintings, pastels and prints.
Jacklins work can be found in over 40 public collections. Among them are: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; British Museum, London; Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, Castagnola; National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, Rotterdam.