Exhibition News: “Michael Mazur: Wakeby Islands” at Ryan Lee Gallery
Michael Mazur, Wakeby Night, 1983. Monotype and pastel on three sheets of paper, 75 x 149 in (190.5 x 378.5 cm)
Michael Mazur: Wakeby Islands
On view: October 25 – November 25, 2023
Opening reception: Saturday, October 28, 4:00-6:00pm
RYAN LEE Gallery, 515 West 26th St, NYC, 10001
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RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present Michael Mazur: Wakeby Islands, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition celebrates the artist’s most famous Wakeby series (1982), a remarkable study of landscape and memory that follows Wakeby Pond’s full cycle of birth, life, death, and renewal—a subject Mazur would return to for years to come. The exhibition includes two monoprints (including some of the largest monotypes to date), an oil painting, and three pastels—all of which display his multidisciplinary dexterity across mediums to create a stunning variance in mood and technique.
Wakeby Pond, an idyllic body of water landlocked on Cape Cod, was where Mazur and his wife, poet Gail Mazur, spent much of their time from the 1970s on. Working from a long-time art studio on the bay, Mazur created prints and paintings of the pond, exploring shifts in perception and time through multiple horizon lines and inclusions of cut-outs of previous Wakeby landscapes, creating ‘picture-within-picture’ compositions. These details disrupt the seemingly linear timeline of a landscape and offer an exciting tension to the composition.
In Gail’s Garden, Wakeby (1983), gentle purple and white flowers convey a patient study of nature and its overgrowth. There are psychological undertones to the loose and gestural flowers overtaking the garden scene, conveying metamorphosis through their sprawl. A series of pastel-on-paper Wakeby studies also approaches the subject with softness, albeit with suggestions of capriciousness. Mazur pays particular attention to creating a nimble horizon line, interrupted by treetops and shrubbery against a colorful, cloudy sky.
Layering, of both subject and content, plays prominently in Mazur’s work. Originally discovering monotype through an exhibition of Edgar Degas’s works in the medium, Mazur was encouraged to explore its capacities. In practice, Mazur worked with master printmaker Robert Townsend in choreographic motions to achieve the extremely experimental and painterly washes in the Wakeby sessions. He eventually began incorporating simulacra through “ghost” impressions of print-over-print layering, and employing the technique of chine-collé, which effects diaphanous backdrops to each print.
Beyond the technical aptitudes underlying each artwork on view, the content itself speaks of a serene, somewhat mystic place. In the Wakeby Night triptychs from 1983 and 1984, we see oversized flowers loitering over a moonlit lake. In the earlier work, the moon glows in green tones, with flora exploding in the foreground; in the later iteration of the scene, while the sunflowers beam yellow, the night light casts a deep blue haze over the more subdued plant life, evoking an entirely different feeling of the placid pond.
Each panel in the original Wakeby Day/Wakeby Night series represented the single largest monotype ever printed at that time, placing the works themselves squarely into the realm of canonical, art historical touchpoints. Not only have the works been produced on massive scales, such as a grand in situ commission in 1982 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but they also now belong to the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC and Brooklyn Museum, NY.
The masterful range of technical nuances used to make these works—like the use of a roller to offset an image on one plate to another, the use of solvents to create painterly drips and layers, and the artist’s uses of his own fingers and rags to create impressionistic, tactile landscape portraiture—are not only iconic to Mazur’s career and œuvre, but to the evolution of the medium and art form of monotype at large.
