Wesleyan University's Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery presents "FLYING CARPETS: new paintings by David Schorr" October 27 through December 11, 2016
presents
FLYING CARPETS: new paintings by David Schorr
Thursday, October 27 through Sunday, December 11, 2016
Middletown, Conn.—FLYING CARPETS: new paintings by David Schorr, a solo exhibition and site-specific installation by Wesleyan University Professor of Art and Chair of the Art and Art History Department David Schorr, will be on view in the Main Gallery at Wesleyan University’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, located at 283 Washington Terrace on the Wesleyan campus in Middletown, Connecticut, from Thursday, October 27 through Sunday, December 11, 2016. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from Noon to 5pm. Gallery admission is free.
The public is invited to attend the Opening Reception on Tuesday, November 1, 2016 from 4:30pm to 6:30pm in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, with a Gallery Talk by David Schorr at 5pm.
There will also be a Preview of the exhibition during Wesleyan Family Weekend on Saturday, October 29, 2016 from 2pm to 4pm in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, with a Gallery Talk by David Schorr at 2:30pm.
The exhibition will be closed for the Thanksgiving holiday from Wednesday, November 23 through Monday, November 28, 2016.
The works in this exhibition are courtesy of RYAN LEE Gallery, New York. Mr. Schorr is represented by the gallery, who will present FLYING CARPETS in January 2017.
Related Event
A Reading by Writer Jonathan Galassi
Wednesday, November 30, 2016 at 5pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown
FREE!
Jonathan Galassi is a poet (most recently the acclaimed Left-Handed Poems, Knopf, 2012), a novelist (Muse, Knopf, 2015), and renowned translator of Italian poetry (Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale). He is also the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux where he is editor to some of its leading novelists and poets. Mr. Galassi wrote the catalog essay that accompanies the exhibition FLYING CARPETS: new paintings by David Schorr. Sponsored by the Wesleyan Writing Certificate and Center for the Arts.
About the Exhibition
In this latest body of work, David Schorr revisits childhood days spent playing on his grandmother’s Persian rugs. Vibrantly colored taxis and racecars drive over paisley designs, while model planes soar midst coffee cans and mailing labels. In his practiced technique of combining gouache with silverpoint drawing on linen, he recreates the richly colored world of his young imagination.
In each of the paintings, the artist contrasts familiar toys from the mid 20th century with images that hint at the exotic and expansive world beyond his Chicago home. Trains and dump trucks traverse floating prayer rugs next to the turbaned man from a coffee company’s logo. The steel models recall an era before plastic, during an earlier day of commercial travel when the possibilities of exploration and discovery felt infinite and even exotic.
These carpets and antique toys continue Mr. Schorr’s fascination with cloth, collections, and text. His interest in fabric and how it drapes appears throughout his practice, as he has previously focused on woven Indian cloths in Khadi (2002) and checkered kitchen towels in THE IMAGINARY LIFE OF ORDINARY THINGS: the dish ran away with the spoon, displayed at Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Center from January through March 2006. Although the vintage ephemera and prayer rugs seem to exist only in fantasy, he researches these historical objects and then often acquires them through eBay and while traveling. Finally, the inventive lettering and brand names of FLYING CARPETS reflect the multilingual bottle labels in APOTHECARY (storehouse), displayed at the Davison Art Center in February and March 2012; and the poetry included in Songs with a Dying Fall (1994).
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog designed by David Schorr, featuring an essay by poet Jonathan Galassi.
About David Schorr
A native of Chicago, educated at Brown and Yale, David Schorr lives and works in New York City and Middletown, Connecticut. He has been a Professor of Art at Wesleyan since 1971, where he teaches printmaking, drawing, typography, book design, graphic design, and calligraphy. He has been a Fulbright Scholar three times, first to Italy in 1975 to work at the Calcografia Nazionale, and then to India in 1998 and 2001. He frequently visits India, where he is an Adjunct Professor at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. He has had multiple fellowships at Tamarind Institute (America's foremost shop of fine arts lithography), most recently during the summer of 2015, and he recently completed a fellowship at the study center in Bogliasco (Liguria, Italy), where some of the FLYING CARPETS were painted.
David Schorr is represented by RYAN LEE Gallery in New York City, where he shows regularly. He has had solo shows in Chicago, Milan, Rome, Naples, Paris, Athens, Toronto, Montreal, Mumbai, New Delhi, Ahmedabad, and Copenhagen. His work has been reproduced in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Poetry Magazine. Mr. Schorr made over two hundred commissioned portraits for The New Republic. He has also been commissioned for murals and posters by The Kennedy Center, The Metropolitan Opera, Scaramouche (restaurant) in Toronto, Verdi (restaurant/cabaret) in Santa Monica, and many other private and public institutions. He has illustrated numerous books, among them Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose, four volumes of the fables of La Fontaine, and a collection from Baudelaire for University of Chicago Press.
His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art (Washington), The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Fogg Museum (Harvard), The New York Public Library, The Israel Museum (Jerusalem), The Morgan Library, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. The Yale University Art Gallery recently acquired his set of sixty engraved portraits of writers, Unconstraining Voices, and in 2016 the Morgan Library acquired Sarah, a handprinted book of Mr. Schorr’s etchings to accompany the poems of Paul Monette. Mr. Schorr’s work has been written about by Paul Monette, Phyllis Rose, Richard Howard, Judith Thurman, Stephen Greenblatt, and most recently Jonathan Galassi, whose essay can be found in the book accompanying FLYING CARPETS.