Lot 2: GARTH WEISER

Double Circle #1 (Red, Brown, White, Grey, Partial Eclipse)
Signed, titled and dated “Garth Weiser 2008, Double Circle #1 Red, Brown, White, Grey, Partial Eclipse, 2008” on the reverse.

93 x 83 in. (236.2 x 210.8 cm)

acrylic and gouache on canvas

2008

Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

Garth Weiser’s hand has been one of the great emerging forces in Contemporary American Abstraction. Solidly basing his work in the tradition of painting, he has careened through an enormous variety of techniques and the use of unconventional tools and mediums in order to engage his creative animus. Though his style of technique has ranged far and wide during his seven years in the professional world, Weiser has achieved prominence through his novel combination of pattern and geometric figure.

Yet the present lot, <em>Double Circle #1 (Red, Brown, White, Grey, Partial Eclipse)</em>, 2008, veers not toward the satirical or socially conscious, but rather toward a more eternal theme in art history: the figure. Stemming from his <em>Nudes</em> series, the present lot displays a rich combination of background and foreground; varying shades of red form the base of the picture, arranged in interlocking quadrilaterals. Their painted barriers never quite hide their seams, however, and the harmony of their imperfections recalls the polygonal nature of Cubism. On their surface sit two rounded figures, side by side. While one breathes quietly in a subdued shade of brown, the other beams out infinite tones of grey and hazel, all radiating from the center point of the circle. There could not be any two pieces of graphic design more remarkably different.

With the knowledge that <em>Double Circle </em>springs from Weiser&#8217;s <em>Nudes</em> series, it would not surprise us to discover that Weiser&#8217;s circles are less the tools of an abstract mathematician and more the figurative breasts of the sitting subject. But, though Weiser is certainly indebted to many artistic traditions—from hard-edge to color-field painting, and even back to the techniques of the Modernists—it is clear that his artistic voice is governed less by anxiety of influence and more by the dictates of an independent mind. The striking mix of representational and non-representational, of the geometric and the imperfect, of rich chromatics and submissive tones, makes Weiser&#8217;s painterly hand a defining and promising one for the new century.