‘Leaves, Diamonds, Moon’ in Wagner College Gallery

‘Leaves, Diamonds, Moon’ in Wagner College Gallery

Kevin Wixted

PLEASE NOTE: The Wagner College Gallery is closed due to the Covid-19 emergency. This web page has been left up only for informational purposes.

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Please join us at the Wagner College Gallery for “Leaves, Diamonds, Moon,” an exhibition of paintings by Kevin Wixted, on display from Friday, March 6 through Saturday, April 18.

The exhibition is free and open to the public.

The gallery is located in the Union Building on the Wagner College campus at 631 Howard Ave., Staten Island.

The Wagner College Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended hours on Thursday until 9 p.m.

“Leaves, Diamonds, Moon” pairs two distinct bodies of paintings Kevin Wixted has been developing over the past few years.

“One can be called abstract and the other representational,” Wixted says, “but the reality is they are one and the same. The paintings question the relationship between perception, memory and invention.”

By showing them side-by-side, Wixted wants to form a dialogue between several strong impulses that are always present in his work.

“This juxtaposition speaks to organic growth systems and sequences in nature,” Wixted says, “but also suggests the mysterious emotional encoding to be found in landscape. As game playing strategies develop through comparisons, the geometric and organic contrast leads to a variety of possibilities and interpretations. This formal play has its roots in the contrast of landscape sources experienced firsthand and the metaphoric potential of abstraction.”

The interaction of color and shape has been an ongoing concern in Wixted’s oeuvre. He concentrates on building an abstract vocabulary of rhythm, pattern and color relationships that reflect his experiences of both working directly from nature and inventing a formal language. Wixted wants the work to develop its own pictorial dynamic beyond the image, reflecting the particular geometry, color, texture and light of place.

Kevin Wixted’s paintings and drawings have appeared nationally and internationally in over 20 solo exhibitions. His shows have been written about in Artforum, Art in America, ArtNews, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the New York Observer and the Hudson Review, among others. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Mississippi Museum of Art, Chase Manhattan Bank, General Electric, Hewlett Packard, Noruma Securities, Societe Generale and Time Warner. Wixted has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, an International Fellowship Faculty Grant, the Alfred University Excellence in Teaching award, and residencies at the Cite Internationale des Arts Paris, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Patrick Allan Fraser of Hospitalfield Foundation/Scotland. He is a professor of painting in the Alfred University School of Art and Design and co-founder of the Alfred/Düsseldorf MFA in Painting program.

For more about the artist, including samples of his painting, visit him on the web at kevinwixted.net.

For more information about the Wagner College Gallery, contact gallery director Jenny Toth at jtoth@wagner.edu.