Project Description
Brian Rutenberg, Looming Pine, 2018, Oil on Linen, 34 x 50 Inches
EXHIBITION DATES
May 25 to July 11, 2018
Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Brian Rutenberg entitled Looming Pine on view from May 25 to July 11, 2018. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street.
Widely considered to be one of the finest American painters of his generation, Brian Rutenberg has spent forty years honing a distinctive method of compressing rich colors and forms into complex landscape paintings that imbue material reality with a deep sense of place. The allusion is often to landscape, but looking closely at his work, it is clear that his primary interest is how the painting was made. The forceful manipulation of his materials allows the viewer a visceral response to the forms within the confines of the canvas. Whether a direct representation or an oblique reference to nature, the aesthetic components of line, space and color allow for the immense possibilities of the imagination and a nod to our shared commonality of human experience.
Brian Rutenberg, Fern Hill 5, 2018, Oil on Linen, 40 x 30 Inches
Brian Rutenberg says, “I do one thing. Every painting I make begins and ends with the same image, a tree trunk and its shadow. That physical marking of location, a tree and its shadow say: ‘This is here.’ By paying attention and drawing them in great detail with pencil on paper, I respond: ‘I am here.’ I’ve never needed a position because I have a place. I don’t paint my native South Carolina, I manufacture a place and South Carolina becomes it.”
Brian Rutenberg, Long Pine, 2018, Oil on Linen, 30 x 40 Inches
“This body of work is collectively titled Looming Pine because the words conjure an image of something distant gradually getting closer. This is why all of my landscape paintings refer to standing in one season peering ahead into another, longing for October in May. I always go back to the wisdom of Winnie the Pooh, who said that his favorite thing isn’t getting honey, but that moment when he might get honey. It has taken me 42 years of painting to see what was there all along: Something can only come to life when we can’t have it.”
Brian Rutenberg, Looming Pine 4, 2018, Oil on Paper, 30 x 22.5 Inches
Brian Rutenberg
