FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JEROME WITKIN, "WITNESS"
April 8 - June 3
Opening Reception: April 7, 7pm
MAJOR SHOW OF NEW YORK CONTEMPORARY PAINTER WITKIN IN L.A.
ADDRESS: Jack Rutberg Fine Arts 357 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90036-2517
CONTACT: Jack Rutberg
Tel, (323) 938-5222; Fax: (323) 938-0577
E-mail, jrutberg@jackrutbergfinearts.com
Los Angeles, CA - Compared by art critics to Lucian Freud, Goya, Manet, and Courbet - to name a few - the New York contemporary painter Jerome Witkin is having his first major exhibition in the Los Angeles area in over five years at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles. The exhibition, entitled “Jerome Witkin: Witness”, opens April 8 and runs through June 3, 2000. This is a large-scale show, with monumental wall works, like “The Butcher’s Helper”, measuring some nine by twenty-three feet.
The last time Witkin had such a show in L.A., his work was called “a break-through in post-Cold- War art” by the L.A. Times. Theodore Wolff, writing for the The Christian Science Monitor, states that “His talents and painterly skills are such that he can challenge the Old Masters at their own game.” And the critic Kenneth Baker has described Witkin as “... one of the finest realist painters working today. He does more than just illustrate things - he stages pictorial dramas that grapple with contemporary historical crises and moral pressures, while offering a lavish physical display of his medium . . .Witkin’s only peer is Lucien Freud.” Witkin’s work is found in the permanent collection of prominent museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
Witkin’s show at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts is a painterly tour-de-force of 50 works that probes seminal events of the twentieth century in huge, vivid canvases and smaller psychological portraits charged with drama and emotion. For example, his painting “The German Girl” explores the awful reality of Hitler’s Germany in a horrifying cinematic tableau. Similarly, “Jesus (A Disbeliever’s Vision)”, takes the viewer on a religious odyssey from an American street corner to other times, other countries, and another reality.
Some of Witkin’s images are graphic enough that museum curators have felt compelled to post cautionary language about their content. The warning stems from reactions to a similar Witkin show held at Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester in New York, where visitors were moved to tears by Witkin’s’s unflinching portrayal of scenes from the Holocaust, including scenes of starvation, rape, mutilation and dismemberment. Witkin’s meticulous portrayal of Nazi atrocities serves as a witness and a warning of mankind’s potential for evil, while memorializing those who perished.
More intimate subjects embracing sex, relationships, the meaning of family and the ambiguities of our emotional landscape are also explored. Haunting personal images and references to the artist’s past surface in pictures like “Pensione/Chino,” where a furnished studio, the artist’s model and a torn glove evoke distilled memories. Witkin’s portraits are equally penetrating, as the psychological nuances of the solitary subject in “Rebecca Stronger” demonstrate.
“Jerome Witkin: Witness” opens at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts with a reception for the artist Friday, April 7 at 7 PM. The show runs from April 8 to June 3, 2000. Witkin will also conduct a dialogue at the gallery on Thursday, May 4 at 7 PM, which is free and open to the public. The exhibition is also the subject of a number of university and museum events at the gallery (please call for additional details).
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