Summary
A native of San Antonio, Texas, Woody Gwyn is well known for his realist landscapes of the American Southwest: endless stretches of highway, barren deserts, winding coastal roads. Gwyn’s seascapes are rendered sometimes in a foggy mist, and at other times shimmering in the sunlight, but always with a strong meditative quality. In many cases the landscapes are so pared down that they are evocative of Agnes Martin’s minimalist works.
Woody Gwyn’s long-standing interest in the horizontal offers new ways of looking at the world. By compressing a landscape into a thin band, he concentrates its essence into a visual field we can comprehend, at the same time that it is about to escape us. These slivers of reality balance on the verge of abstraction.
For anyone who has stared long and hard at the sea, the seascapes offer multifaceted metaphors for finity and infinity, fear and spiritual calm. Bands of fog obscure the horizon and create new ones, revealing the constant change expected of the ocean. But these lovely, peaceful, “empty” images also suggest the power of nature. Gwyn has a philosophical bent. His work encourages us to see ourselves in the continuum of time and space, large and small, land, sea, and sky. —Lucy R. Lippard
Woody Gwyn has exhibited extensively in the United States, and his works are included in the collections of many important institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Denver Museum of Art.
Press
Woody GWYN
Woody Gwyn - Santa Fe Trend 2011
2011-12-20
