June 27 - August 29, 2015

Jerald Melberg Gallery is pleased to present Robert Motherwell: A Centenary Exhibition, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the famed American artist’s birthday. The exhibition features collages, paintings and works on paper highlighting several of the artist’s hallmark styles and periods, including the Elegies, the Lyric Suites, and the Open Series.

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) is unquestionably one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century. In the 1940s, Motherwell became the youngest member of a group of artists known as the Abstract Expressionists, the first fully American art movement. Like other Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock, De Kooning, and Rothko, Motherwell rejected conventional realism and instead he was interested in exploring a reality that went beyond the recognizable image. Motherwell had a particular fascination and preference for working with paper. He also felt that his involvement with printmaking was just as important and vital to his work as his collages or paintings on canvas.

His inclination toward paper is well illustrated in his 1965 Lyric Suites, from which the gallery has recently obtained twelve works directly from the artist’s estate. This series most aptly demonstrates Motherwell’s desire to explore Automatism, a means of expressing the subconscious through writing, drawing, and art. Highly gestural, this series of ink drawings on Japanese rice paper contains nearly six hundred works created while Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite played in the studio, from which they take their name.

In addition to our newly acquired Lyric Suites, we will show drawings from Motherwell’s Joyce Sketchbook. Known for his admiration of James Joyce, Motherwell was invited to participate in events relating to the author, as well as to create illustrations for a special edition of etchings – which will also be in the exhibition – for the 1922 modernist novel Ulysses. In the early to mid 1980s, Motherwell created a number of drawings in small notepads, one of which came to be the Joyce Sketchbook. He would draw while taking breaks from painting, often employing iconography similar to what is found in his paintings and prints. While he generally tried to keep this imagery in an abstract realm, illustrative compositions such as architectural forms often emerged.

His career encompassed more than five decades, and he received virtually every honor accorded to an artist. His work has been the subject of countless museum exhibitions and publications. His first major retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. Since that time, he has been honored with retrospectives by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, among others.

This exhibition will travel to Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC from September 4 through December 31, 2015.

Jerald Melberg Gallery is located at 625 South Sharon Amity Road near the intersection with Providence Road. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm. For more information about the exhibition please contact the gallery at 704.365.3000. To view selected works online, visit the gallery’s web site at www.jeraldmelberg.com.