Verse and Chorus: Douglas Witmer

Gray Contemporary is pleased to announce Verse and Chorus, an exhibition featuring works by Douglas Witmer. The exhibition will open Saturday, April 9th from 5:00 to 9:00 pm, and will continue through May 14th.

Using direct, economical, and conscious actions, Douglas Witmer’s paintings are characterized by emphatic bands of solid color spanning across ephemeral wash-like grounds. Witmer’s painting process is completely intuitive and additive. Every decision is made directly on the surface. The elemental nature of Witmer’s compositions quickly lead the viewer into all-out sensuality around the experience of the painted object.

Witmer has said, “in the 21st century, I see my work as offering a clear alternative in a visual culture dominated by speed, layering, and complexity. I do not believe my work requires any prerequisite knowledge beyond what you bring to it. My hope is that it can activate the sense that you simply feel yourself seeing. I like to think of that kind of moment as clear, pure, innocent, and solitary. And if you can get to it, then you have, in a way, started an experiential engine for yourself, and your thoughts can begin to move in uniquely personal directions.”

This speaks to the sense of Witmer’s personal history embedded in the paintings, having been raised in the Mennonite culture of Lancaster County, PA with deep connections to simplicity, peacemaking, and humility.

Writing in Art New England, the critic David Raymond said, “Witmer’s sensual paintings reflect an imaging project that secures a clear emotional weight.”

An accomplished musician and music enthusiast, Witmer titles his work by appropriating lyrical phrases from the songs he plays in his studio headphones. The exhibition title “Verse and Chorus” alludes to the idea that individual paintings contribute in a way one might think of voices in an ensemble.

As the critic Jessica Bryce Young wrote in Orlando Weekly, Witmer’s work “develops like a meditation; the repeated interaction of [material] slowly builds a body of knowledge, much as a child learns to write by repeating the same motions over and over.”

A brief description of the Artist:

Over the course of the past two decades, Witmer has become internationally known within the field of reductive geometric abstraction.

In 2011 an exhibition spanning a decade of the artist’s work was mounted at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL. Other venues include MoMA PS1, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, The University of Maryland, The University of Dayton, ParisCONCRET (France), and Sydney Non-Objective (Australia).

His work is in the collections of The Woodmere Art Museum, The Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, and The Fellowship of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as well as numerous corporate and private collections internationally.

He is a member of the Philadelphia-based artist collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid.

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