Exhibition Dates: January 30 – February 24, 2024

Opening Reception: Sat, February 3, 2024, 3PM-6PM

Closing Reception with Performance and Artist Talk: Sat, February 24, 2024, 4PM featuring a cello performance by Robert Reed at 4pm followed a conversation on art between the artist Thaddeus Radell and Mark LaRiviere

Bowery Gallery is pleased to present recent work by Thaddeus Radell, whose darkly luminous paintings evoke journeys through landscapes of the subconscious. From the artist’s richly layered surfaces—broadly troweled in places, elsewhere delicately incised— emerge visions of figures that appear and disappear within atmospheric depths. Bits of embedded burlap suggest a ragged dimension beyond paint. The heavy impasto, set against thinly brushed lines of saturated earth colors, creates living, breathing surfaces.

In my beginning is my end. So reads the opening line of “East Coker,” the second poem comprising the “Four Quartets” of T.S. Eliot. Poetry, and the poems of Eliot in particular, have marked Radell’s recent paintings, which bear such titles as “Wandering the Waste Land,” “Gerontion,” and “The Hollow Men,” a group of four large panels.

The exhibition includes larger works staggered between a number of small paintings of heads. These roughly hewn portrait studies might very well be, as Mark Kanter observed in his essay of 2021, “mugshots for the perpetrators” of the figures populating the larger compositions, where the heads exist only as masses of color.

Radell is also currently represented by Thomas Deans Fine Art in Atlanta, GA and Alice Gauvin Gallery in Washington, DC.