4 Magnascos
July 10, 2020 – December 27, 2020
Painter James Hyde joins us from the Boiler in Williamsburg where he's been working on mammoth, billboard sized canvases for Weekend Journal #55. These four paintings are based on enlargements of tiny details from paintings by the Italian Rococo painter Alessandro Magnasco, a kind of homage to the under-known artist.
From James -
"With these paintings at the Boiler, it wasn't so much I was influenced by Magnasco -- I chose him. I first saw Magnasco's paintings over 20 years ago. There was a big museum exhibition of his work in Milan where I was working on a show. At that point, maybe he chose me, because I wasn't going to see the exhibit because his dark Rococo sensibility wasn't my type of work; seeing it in person was convincing, however. Over the years, I’ve enjoying seeing his paintings in a variety of museums -- it's been like bumping into an old friend.
The works in the Boiler entailed taking a high-resolution photograph of a detail from a couple Magnasco paintings (the paintings are at the National Gallery in DC). The details in these paintings are of Magnasco’s stormy seas. The details are then enlarged and printed on billboard material. These giant photos get covered with many layers of glazes with metallic pigments, glass beads, ground minerals and shredded tire rubber, to become finished works. I've been working on this series of "Magnascos" for seven years, but these four paintings -- painted mostly in the Boiler -- are the largest. The reason for choosing Magnasco to form the basis of paintings has as much to do with how different his sensibility is to mine, as it does with similarities. I wanted there to be a gulf to bridge. I also chose him because, despite being a terrific painter, he’s not part of the “great master” canon. I wanted to advertise him, even as I was over painting the photos of his painting."
About the Artist
James Hyde is a materialist abstract painter, whose work ranges from frescos to glass box paintings and most recently painting on photographic prints. Hyde has produced exhibitions at the Maison de la Culture de Bourges and the Centre d’Art Contemporain d’Ivry, in France and the San Diego Museum of Art. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, among others. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the French National Art Collection (FNAC) and the Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Switzerland. Hyde has lectured as a visiting professor at a number of institutions, including Yale University, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Cooper Union. He is currently the Kennedy Family Lecturer at the University of Southern Florida at Tampa, and will present new paintings based on imagery of public sculpture at Freight + Volume this year. #elmfoundation.