NEW YORK, NY.- Betty Cuningham Gallery opened Look Around featuring recent paintings by Chuck Webster. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Saturday, January 28th and the exhibition will remain on view through Saturday, February 18, 2017.

Webster can best be characterized as a visionary painter. His vocabulary is highly personal. Drawn from his imagination and from the world, the shapes in his paintings are abstract but oddly recognizable. Webster titles this exhibition Look Around revealing the dialogue he has with his painting as it moves towards completion.

The current exhibition contains ten paintings, all oil on panel, ranging in size from 38 x 29 to 84 x 120 inches. Sharing a kinship to the late paintings of Philip Guston, Webster’s paintings play with scale. Whether in a large painting or a small painting, Webster’s figure typically dominates the work. The surfaces are further activated by heavy brushwork, incidental markings and taut delineation.

Born in Binghamton, NY, Chuck Webster received a BA from Oberlin College in 1992 and a MFA from American University in 1996. The artist’s work can be seen in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; and The Beinecke Library at Yale University, New Haven, CT. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Milton and Sally Michel Avery Visual Arts Fellowship, at Yaddo, 2010 and 2000; the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2016; the MacDowell Fellowship, Peterborough, NH, 2004 and 2017; and the Winter Fellowship at the Fine Art Works Center in Provincetown MA, 2004. Webster lives and works in New York City.

Paint and form move through a succession of thoughts and allusions. Clues come and go as the work moves along. I walk into the picture, look around, think, and perhaps start to understand. Then at some point, the painting and I arrive together to a new and insistent condition, a kind of mystery that does not have a solution and yet still affirms its right to be. ~Chuck Webster, 2016