Denzil Hurley
West Indian, b. 1949
Denzil Hurley was born in Barbados, West Indies in 1949. He studied at the Portland Museum Art School (B.F.A. 1975) and Yale School of Art (M.F.A. 1979). Hurley has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1989, 1993), and a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (1989). His work was featured in a two-person show at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX, 1998) and a solo show at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO, 2004). Hurley’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Short Stories at the Henry Art Gallery (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 2001), American Academy Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture (American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, 2002), and International Abstraction (Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, 2003-04).
Denzil Hurley’s paintings reflect the way he works adding and removing layers of paint, building up and reaching back into the painting, creating through subtle variations of texture and color a history of activity that is the work itself. The 2006 February show, consisting of fifteen to eighteen oil paintings in a variety of sizes, was Hurley’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO mounted an exhibition of his paintings in 2004. Hurley’s work has also been included in Short Stories at the Henry Art Gallery (2001), American Academy Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2002), and International Abstraction at the Seattle Art Museum (2003-04).
The paintings of Denzil Hurley bear the process of their making, as subtle layers of color accrue only to be scraped back, sanded, and pockmarked. The paintings really are not “about” anything but themselves; yet they form a visual and emotional communication between artist and viewer. In a catalogue essay for an early 2006 exhibition at Frances Seders Gallery in Seattle, Sheryl Conkleton wrote that Hurley's paintings “engage the viewer with a proposition: an exchange of labor for labor….the artist's looking and thinking, as well as the more active work of making, are present—palpable solicitations of reciprocal commitment from the viewer.” Hurley's commitment to his task is equally apparent in small scale canvases—in the vicinity of 24” x 18”—and larger paintings of up to 80” x 80.” Each is a dialogue between the artist and his canvas and paint. The meditative aspect of the paintings is paralleled by Hurley's intense focus in their making.
Denzil Hurley: Falk Visiting Artist
January 14, 2007 – April 8, 2007
Denzil Hurley has been a professor since 1994 in the School of Art at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is the recipient of prestigious awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. His work has been exhibited widely across the country and is in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, among others. Hurley's exhibition is part of the Falk Visiting Artists Program, a collaboration between the Weatherspoon and the Department of Art at UNCG, which brings artists to the campus and community for a short residency of graduate critiques, a gallery talk, and public lecture
Denzil Hurley, the current Falk visiting artist, comes to us with an impressive record: a National Endowment of the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a graduate degree from Yale. Above all he possesses an incredible, cerebral, almost religious dedication to his art and practice. Theory, though, isn't everything, and a visit to the gallery calls into question the relevance of this modernist heavyweight in the swift current of contemporary art.
Brute written description does little to convey the sense of these works. Hurley's "Glyph-D" is a large body-sized pumpkin orange field with charcoal black dots and horizontal marks patterned over it, reminiscent of words on a page. This may be generous. You could just as easily say Hurley's "Glyph-D" is an orange rectangle with black dots on it. Other paintings are more engaging, most notably those where Hurley has worked reductively, literally digging through dense layers of paint to reveal submerged pockets of color. But even here, it's how he did it that's more interesting than the result. The fact is that this work exists less in the gallery and more behind the scenes in the intellectual realm of the artist's method.
So much of Denzil Hurley's art is in his Practice-with a capital "P," the way believers write the "A" in Art. Behind each piece are several years of reworking, rethinking, and reattempts. Hurley's paintings represent a gradual turning from one facet of an idea to another, slow permutations of form and color, a meticulous exploration of every possibility of his painterly language. The work, like much modernist abstraction, provokes the, "My kid could to this," knee-jerk. The difference in this case is that your kid would never take eight years.
None of the current paintings took that long; the work in the Weatherspoon dates from 2001 to 2006. Hurley spent at most three years on any single piece and apparently advanced several series at once - sequences with names like "Redact," "Scrib," and "Variant." Still, the viewer is struck by the homogeneity of the grouping: browns, oranges, blacks and creams, dots and dashes. The art's evolution to this point has taken some 15 years since Hurley first placed a lone dot in the center of a white field and called it art. The dots have multiplied, the colors changed, dancing through different configurations - and that's about it.
It's about Practice, you see. It's about Paint. Hurley is a modernist abstract painter in postmodern times, undaunted by world events - war, the '80s and the death of painting - dedicated fervently to his outmoded pictorial language, to the meditative act of artmaking, to his solitary studio in Seattle.
The question, ultimately, is twofold: how is - or simply is - the work of Denzil Hurley relevant to us today? And what can we learn from him? Certainly we can admire his dogged studio practice; we can also ridicule his hermetic insistence on the "old way." We, students of liberal arts in a new century, saturated by video and photography and performance, can hail his belief in painting for painting's sake, pure abstraction, elegance and simplicity integrated into both life and work; or we can look to Rothko instead - a comparison which Hurley himself evoked at least twice during his recent Falk slide lecture-who broke through the same barriers of artistic perception that Hurley methodically continues to probe almost 50 years later. Practice, too, was Rothko's thing, and Pollock's, and a great many painters since.
And here's Hurley, in the 21st century, propagating an ancient strain of minimalism (though he resists the term). It's a search process, after all. But for what? Nature? Truth? Humanity? Soul? Or just another painting? Hurley cites as a turning point a series where he began joining monochrome canvases together with bars of paint. "It was sort of interesting to nail two things together with simple color," the artist said. Hurley has spent a long and respected career exploring formal relationships. But how does this work extend beyond the canvas, beyond the studio and gallery, beyond stuffy Yale or New York or Seattle and into the spiritual realm where paintings actually live? There is certainly a viable academic defense of the significance of this art. But with Hurley's work I'm inclined to go with my gut - which hardly seems to notice I'm viewing art at all.
Hurley himself best encapsulated his limitations during his lecture. "I'm reading my own work," he said, "and trying to stay within that, trying to stay grounded in that." Are we really content with this insular brand of art? Now? After this ground has been broken for decades? He's tapping out meticulous telegrams in the Internet age.
The work of Denzil Hurley is on display in the Falk gallery of the Weatherspoon until April 8, 2007
West Indian, b. 1949
Denzil Hurley was born in Barbados, West Indies in 1949. He studied at the Portland Museum Art School (B.F.A. 1975) and Yale School of Art (M.F.A. 1979). Hurley has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1989, 1993), and a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (1989). His work was featured in a two-person show at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX, 1998) and a solo show at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO, 2004). Hurley’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Short Stories at the Henry Art Gallery (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 2001), American Academy Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture (American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, 2002), and International Abstraction (Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, 2003-04).
Denzil Hurley’s paintings reflect the way he works adding and removing layers of paint, building up and reaching back into the painting, creating through subtle variations of texture and color a history of activity that is the work itself. The 2006 February show, consisting of fifteen to eighteen oil paintings in a variety of sizes, was Hurley’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO mounted an exhibition of his paintings in 2004. Hurley’s work has also been included in Short Stories at the Henry Art Gallery (2001), American Academy Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2002), and International Abstraction at the Seattle Art Museum (2003-04).
The paintings of Denzil Hurley bear the process of their making, as subtle layers of color accrue only to be scraped back, sanded, and pockmarked. The paintings really are not “about” anything but themselves; yet they form a visual and emotional communication between artist and viewer. In a catalogue essay for an early 2006 exhibition at Frances Seders Gallery in Seattle, Sheryl Conkleton wrote that Hurley's paintings “engage the viewer with a proposition: an exchange of labor for labor….the artist's looking and thinking, as well as the more active work of making, are present—palpable solicitations of reciprocal commitment from the viewer.” Hurley's commitment to his task is equally apparent in small scale canvases—in the vicinity of 24” x 18”—and larger paintings of up to 80” x 80.” Each is a dialogue between the artist and his canvas and paint. The meditative aspect of the paintings is paralleled by Hurley's intense focus in their making.
Denzil Hurley: Falk Visiting Artist
January 14, 2007 – April 8, 2007
Denzil Hurley has been a professor since 1994 in the School of Art at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is the recipient of prestigious awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. His work has been exhibited widely across the country and is in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, among others. Hurley's exhibition is part of the Falk Visiting Artists Program, a collaboration between the Weatherspoon and the Department of Art at UNCG, which brings artists to the campus and community for a short residency of graduate critiques, a gallery talk, and public lecture
Denzil Hurley, the current Falk visiting artist, comes to us with an impressive record: a National Endowment of the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a graduate degree from Yale. Above all he possesses an incredible, cerebral, almost religious dedication to his art and practice. Theory, though, isn't everything, and a visit to the gallery calls into question the relevance of this modernist heavyweight in the swift current of contemporary art.
Brute written description does little to convey the sense of these works. Hurley's "Glyph-D" is a large body-sized pumpkin orange field with charcoal black dots and horizontal marks patterned over it, reminiscent of words on a page. This may be generous. You could just as easily say Hurley's "Glyph-D" is an orange rectangle with black dots on it. Other paintings are more engaging, most notably those where Hurley has worked reductively, literally digging through dense layers of paint to reveal submerged pockets of color. But even here, it's how he did it that's more interesting than the result. The fact is that this work exists less in the gallery and more behind the scenes in the intellectual realm of the artist's method.
So much of Denzil Hurley's art is in his Practice-with a capital "P," the way believers write the "A" in Art. Behind each piece are several years of reworking, rethinking, and reattempts. Hurley's paintings represent a gradual turning from one facet of an idea to another, slow permutations of form and color, a meticulous exploration of every possibility of his painterly language. The work, like much modernist abstraction, provokes the, "My kid could to this," knee-jerk. The difference in this case is that your kid would never take eight years.
None of the current paintings took that long; the work in the Weatherspoon dates from 2001 to 2006. Hurley spent at most three years on any single piece and apparently advanced several series at once - sequences with names like "Redact," "Scrib," and "Variant." Still, the viewer is struck by the homogeneity of the grouping: browns, oranges, blacks and creams, dots and dashes. The art's evolution to this point has taken some 15 years since Hurley first placed a lone dot in the center of a white field and called it art. The dots have multiplied, the colors changed, dancing through different configurations - and that's about it.
It's about Practice, you see. It's about Paint. Hurley is a modernist abstract painter in postmodern times, undaunted by world events - war, the '80s and the death of painting - dedicated fervently to his outmoded pictorial language, to the meditative act of artmaking, to his solitary studio in Seattle.
The question, ultimately, is twofold: how is - or simply is - the work of Denzil Hurley relevant to us today? And what can we learn from him? Certainly we can admire his dogged studio practice; we can also ridicule his hermetic insistence on the "old way." We, students of liberal arts in a new century, saturated by video and photography and performance, can hail his belief in painting for painting's sake, pure abstraction, elegance and simplicity integrated into both life and work; or we can look to Rothko instead - a comparison which Hurley himself evoked at least twice during his recent Falk slide lecture-who broke through the same barriers of artistic perception that Hurley methodically continues to probe almost 50 years later. Practice, too, was Rothko's thing, and Pollock's, and a great many painters since.
And here's Hurley, in the 21st century, propagating an ancient strain of minimalism (though he resists the term). It's a search process, after all. But for what? Nature? Truth? Humanity? Soul? Or just another painting? Hurley cites as a turning point a series where he began joining monochrome canvases together with bars of paint. "It was sort of interesting to nail two things together with simple color," the artist said. Hurley has spent a long and respected career exploring formal relationships. But how does this work extend beyond the canvas, beyond the studio and gallery, beyond stuffy Yale or New York or Seattle and into the spiritual realm where paintings actually live? There is certainly a viable academic defense of the significance of this art. But with Hurley's work I'm inclined to go with my gut - which hardly seems to notice I'm viewing art at all.
Hurley himself best encapsulated his limitations during his lecture. "I'm reading my own work," he said, "and trying to stay within that, trying to stay grounded in that." Are we really content with this insular brand of art? Now? After this ground has been broken for decades? He's tapping out meticulous telegrams in the Internet age.
The work of Denzil Hurley is on display in the Falk gallery of the Weatherspoon until April 8, 2007
Artist Objects
Untitled 2008.073
Artist Images