posted: 9/26/2010

To Pressroom

The Art of Andy Wing, 1957-1987 On View November 1, 2011 – May 31, 2012 Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Saturday by appointment Reception: November 5, 5:00 to 8:00 ______________________________________________________________________________

“Living and painting in nature, you identify with natural processes . . . Everything can speak to you. When you become attuned in that way, it’s very interesting.” – Andy Wing

NEWPORT BEACH, CA – Art Resource Group is proud be a participating gallery in Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, a collaboration between the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute and more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California celebrating the birth of the L.A. art scene. To contribute to this celebration, Art Resource Group will present an exhibition of paintings and sculptures spanning three decades of the remarkable career of beloved Laguna Beach artist Andrew “Andy” Staley Wing (1931-2004). Wing’s works are an important addition to the Pacific Standard Time program, demonstrating the unique influence of the Southern California art scene and physical environs on a young East Coast painter who went on to earn his MFA at Cal State Long Beach and contribute significantly to the advancement of modern art in this region. In 1956 Andy Wing, a recent Bard College graduate and an artist with the Miller Advertising Agency, packed his bags, left New York, and headed West. He wrote in his journal that he hoped to “find the tranquility in which to be [himself] and create, and try to absorb, overcome and place in proper perspective” his art education. Wing chose to free himself from artistic convention, delving into a period of intense creative experimentation in idyllic Laguna Beach, California, where he found a community of like-minded intellectual Bohemians whose respect he earned because of his authenticity, art and activism. Andy Wing was one of many American abstract artists whose art was grounded in the forms, materials and cadences of nature. He took classes at the Art Students League in New York City, and although he never studied under Hans Hofmann, many of Wing’s artistic philosophies echo Hofmann’s Abstract Expressionist teachings, specifically Hofmann’s exploration of experimental “action” painting and his creation of “push/pull” visual sensations within his vital, light-filled paintings. Yet the techniques Wing employed to achieve these goals were ones he developed alone, based on his own social conscience, artistic instincts and personal circumstances. Although much of Wing’s work is completely abstract, his forward-thinking passion for conservation drove him to repurpose found materials in his constructions, some of which remained recognizable within the finished works, now elevated to the status of art. He stored all manner of urban debris and wooden forms found in nature in an area of his Laguna Beach property he referred to as his “recyclery.” From these materials, Wing constructed his own innovatively shaped canvases and painting surfaces. He was initially forced by his finances to make the outdoors his studio, but over time the environment of his garden became an integral part of his season- and nature-based artistic process. Wing’s work is characterized by his promotion of organically made natural pigments and invented art processes that reflect an early interest in interventions in nature; he would deliberately and dramatically throw cups of carefully mixed paint onto his surfaces, alternatively allowing pigment to pool and saturate or dragging his notably long fingers – a result of Marfan’s syndrome – through the colors to blend them. He was known to have hung perilously from a ladder to apply paint, thereby mastering the effects of gravity on his art. His strategy of exposing his works to the elements of nature in order to create their exceptional patinas underscores his desire to enlist external universal forces as partners in his creative endeavors. While heaving pigment onto a canvas in a 1987 video recording, Wing explained, “The process is to feel my own being, from the heel of my shoe up to every aspect of myself, in relation to the wind and to the way that I’m moving.” The end result of this experimentation is a substantial body of work that is brilliant in both color and theory. Wing played with the notions of negative/positive and abstraction/representation to create art that is at once contemplative, vibrantly seductive and remarkably innovative. As a result of the sculpted frames he applied to many of his constructions, his paintings often read as icons – content and context united. Throughout his career, Wing bravely struck a powerful and playful balance between art and object, engaging those drawn to the sheer beauty of his works in a revelatory dialogue about the still-relevant concepts of conservation and excess, nature and the surreal, consciousness and transformation. The Art of Andy Wing: Works from 1957 – 1987 will run from October 25, 2011 to May 30, 2012 and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a comprehensive chronology and an essay by independent curator Carole Ann Klonarides. Art Resource Group, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, is located at 20351 Irvine Avenue, Suite C-1, Newport Beach, CA 92660. For more information, call 714.371.0101, email Miriam Smith at msmith@artresourcegroup.com or visit our website at www.artresourcegroup.com. Slides and digital images are available. ###