Patrick Wilson at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition of new work by Patrick Wilson.

Patrick Wilson’s intensely colorful canvases are populated by hard-edged, quadrilateral planes in varying opacities, layered and cantilevered in carefully finessed compositions. His new works reflect an increasingly energetic complexity that Lilly Wei has described in a recent essay as “breathtaking and nuanced, the juxtapositions [between colors] often quirky and unpredictable.” 

Viewers often assume, at first glance, that Wilson’s paintings are composed of thin sheets of plastic or metal that have been airbrushed and assembled, but they are in fact composed of fastidiously applied layers of acrylic paint. He is an immaculate painter, working carefully by hand with tape and a drywall blade to create seamless planes that seem at once solid and transparent, referential to the modernist architecture that dots the Southern California landscape and to the iconic “light and space” artists and West Coast hard edge abstractionists (Larry Bell, Frederic Hammersley, Robert Irwin, John McLaughlin) who have engaged with these peculiarities and particularities of atmosphere and surface in their work. 

The finished paintings are pristine, but also carry evidence of the artist’s hand – a subtle bloom of color along an otherwise flawlessly straight line, a slight whimsy in the corner of a square – always inviting the viewer to slow down and examine their nearly sculptural surfaces. They are a pleasure to look at, and it is this insistence on the real value of formal beauty as something to be desired, pursued, and considered deeply that defines Wilson’s paintings. 

Patrick Wilson (b. 1970, Redding, CA) received his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of California, Davis in 1993 and his Masters of Fine Art degree at Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, CA in 1995. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including “Evolving Geometries: Line, Form, and Color,” Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA; “Patrick Wilson: Pull,” University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA; and exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Ameringer, McEnery, and Yohe, New York; Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, and Curator’s Office, Washington DC. Recent group exhibitions include "Pivotal: Highlights from the Collection", Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; “On the Road: American Abstraction,” David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI; “Geometrix: Line, Form, Subversion,” Curator’s Office, Washington, D.C.; “NOW-ISM: Abstraction Today.” Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; “California Visual Music – Three Generations of Abstraction,” Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Orange, CA; “Local Color,” San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; 2010 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; “Keeping it Straight: Right Angles and Hard Edges in Contemporary Southern California,” Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA; and “Gyroscope,” Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. His work is included in many public and private collections including the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; and the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA.

https://www.vielmetter.com/exhibitions/current/572/pressrelease.html