Artist Talk - Wayne Gonzales

Kent State University School of Art presents an artist talk with visiting artist in painting, Wayne Gonzales. The talk will take place on Friday, Nov. 1 at noon in room 165 at the Center for the Visual Arts. All artist talks and lectures are free and open to the public.

Wayne Gonzales was born in 1957 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He now lives and works in New York, USA. Contemplative, evocative and mysterious, Gonzales' work uses a rigorous formal structure to mine the processes of painting and perception. His process begins with digital images culled from random searches on the internet. In addition to this, he uses source photographs of places and people taken himself. Gonzales often revisits the images he has taken and zooms in and out of the whole composition like a camera lens, cropping, moving and playing around so that the final work has a whole different meaning.

Recently Gonzales has executed work using crosshatching to mine the detail of distinctly American scenes. He creates form through the density of interlocking lines, resulting in depths of shadow and light. The method recalls the etchings of Old Masters, along with the line drawings of contemporary artists such as Sol LeWitt. In March 2019 Stephen Friedman Gallery staged Gonzales' fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. In autumn 2020 Gonzales will have a solo exhibition at Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles.Gonzales' works are included in prominent international collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Microsoft Art Collection, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Maramotti Collection, Reggio Emilia, Italy.

Image: Wayne Gonzales, Trailer and Dock, Reggio, Louisiana, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 96 inches