Come see us in Florida at
January 20–23, 2012
Courthouse
Gallery FIne Art Booth #604
Palm Beach County Convention Center
650 Okeechobee Boulevard
West Palm Beach, Florida
Complimentary Passes to Art Palm Beach
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Karin and Michael Wilkes are pleased to announce Courthouse Gallery Fine Art will participate in the 15th Annual Art Palm Beach International Art Fair. This is the second year the Wilkes’ will showcase contemporary Maine painters and sculptors at the fair. There will be a First View from 6pm-7:30pm, followed by an Invitational Gala until 10pm on Thrusday, January 19. The First View and Gala are by invitation only, so be sure to request a VIP Pass if you would like to attend.
For 2012, Courthouse Gallery will showcase four Maine artists, whose work spans several styles and media including, sculpture, printmaking, mixed media, and painting.
Jane Dahmen3h>, Charlie Hewitt, Alison Hildreth, and George Wardlaw
You can view their work online: Jane Dahmen, Charlie Hewitt, Alison Hildreth, George Wardlaw.
In addition, Courthouse Gallery will host an installation for American artist George Wardlaw (b. 1927) at the invitation of the fair organizers. The installation highlights three monumental sculptures from Wardlaw's Exodus I and II Series, which consist of fourteen large-scale acrylic and aluminum sculptures based on Jewish history and identity. In conjunction with the installation, art historian, theologian, and author Ori Z. Soltes will give a lecture about Wardlaw’s work at 1:30-2:30pm on Saturday, January 21. The installation and lecture will coincide with the release of George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders, the first comprehensive account of Wardlaw’s sixty-year career. The hardcover, 184-page book presents Wardlaw's work in over 180 full color plates and illustrations. Art historians J. Richard Gruber, Ori Z. Soltes, and Suzette McAvoy contributed critical essays to the book.Art historians J. Richard Gruber, Ori Z. Soltes, and Suzette McAvoy contributed critical essays to the book. Marshall Wilkes, an independent publisher of fine art books based in Maine, published the book.
Also showing at Art Palm Beach this year are: Stephenie Bartron-Miscione, Jeffery Becton, Tom Curry, Philip Frey, Harold Garde, Paul Hannon, Kazumi Hoshino, Mark Kindschi, John Neville, Colin Page, Stephen Porter, Alison Rector, Jesse Salisbury, David Vickery.
George Wardlaw’s Monumental Sculptures at Art Palm
Beach
Lee Ann and David Lester, the Art Palm Beach organizers,
invited Courthouse Gallery to host an installation for American artist
George Wardlaw (b. 1927) at the 2012 fair. In conjunction with the
installation, art historian, theologian, and author Ori Z. Soltes will
give a lecture about Wardlaw's work at 1:30-2:30pm on Saturday, January
21.
The installation and lecture will coincide with the release of George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders, the first comprehensive account of Wardlaw's sixty-year career. The hardcover, 184-page book presents Wardlaw's work in over 180 full color plates and illustrations. Critical essays by J. Richard Gruber, Ori Z. Soltes, and Suzette McAvoy characterize Wardlaw's work, placing it in context with the significant art movements of his time, beginning in 1948, with non-objective painting and tracing his journey across geographical, physical, intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual boundaries. Marshall Wilkes, an independent publisher of fine art books based in Maine, published the book. There will be a book signing with Mr. Wardlaw and Mr. Soltes immediately following the lecture.
George Wardlaw: Passage to Abstraction (Installation
Description)
The three sculptures in the installation, Parting of
the Red Sea, The Burning Bush, and The Ark of the
Covenant, are part of Wardlaw’s Exodus I and II Series, which
consist of fourteen large-scale acrylic and aluminum sculptures based on
Jewish history and identity. These monumental sculptures cross the
boundaries of religious perception and abstraction—“they forcibly
generate a mystical spiritual sense of necessity, both pleasing and
fearful,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, 1988.
The Exodus series represents Wardlaw’s desire to pass between figuration and abstraction, literalism and metaphor, between symbols and their meanings, and an aesthetic that offers pure emotion rather than intellectual exercise. The negotiation of parallel borders—between servitude and freedom, wilderness and homeland, ethnic and spiritual identity—are essential to the narrative of Exodus and reflect the crisscrossing paths within the journey of Wardlaw’s own life.

Parting of the Red Sea, 1989–92, acrylic on aluminum, 92 x 204 x 66 inches
These unique sculptures are intended for a gargantuan space—each piece can stand alone, or they can stand together—in any number of configurations—like the tribes of Israel and the families within each tribe and the individuals within each family. These sculptures cut across artistic expectations and diverse religious boundaries to reveal a common spiritual concern.
Lecture with Ori Z. Soltes
Event: "Jewish Identity and
Intensity in the Work of George Wardlaw"
Speaker: Ori Z. Soltes
Date: Saturday, January 21, 2012
Time: 1:30 – 2:30pm
Place: Palm Beach County Convention Center
Book Signing: Immediately
following with Mr. Wardlaw and Mr. Soltes
Art historian and theologian Ori Z. Soltes, one of three authors who contributed to Crossing Borders, will give a lecture on Wardlaw’s work titled “Jewish Identity and Intensity in the Work of George Wardlaw” in conjunction with the installation. For more information on Crossing Borders, or to purchase a copy of the book, visit the publisher at www.marshallwilkes.com.
“Jewish Identity and
Intensity in the Work of George Wardlaw”
The art of George Wardlaw
offers an ongoing dance between immutable ideas and those that keep
changing. He has never allowed his work to stay confined by
categories—his painting is sculptural, his sculpture is both painterly
and architectural, and his early small-scale metalsmithing resonates
with his later gargantuan artworks. Wardlaw’s work reflects art history
in both its universal concerns and, in a varied array of works, in the
questions that art history raises for contemporary Jewish artists: Where
does our work fit into Western art, which for so many centuries has been
largely Christian art? What sorts of subjects are particularly relevant
to “Jewish” art? What elements of style and symbol apply? How obvious or
covert ought the reflections to these issues be? His work is a dazzling
expression of diversely shaped identity and intensity.
Biography
for Ori Z. Soltes
Ori Z. Soltes is Professorial Lecturer in Theology
and Fine Arts at Georgetown University and former director of the B’nai
B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where he
curated over eighty exhibitions on a variety of subjects. He is the
author of articles, exhibition catalogs, essays, and books on a range of
topics, including Fixing the World: American Jewish Painters in the
Twentieth Century, Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and
Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source, Searching for Oneness:
Mysticism in the Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and
Untangling the Web: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Why the Middle East
Is a Mess and Always Has Been. He is currently completing a book on
the definition of Jewish art and architecture called Tradition and
Transformation.
Quote about the George Wardlaw: Crossing
Borders:
"No one can say that George Wardlaw is a one-theme artist.
Unlike less venturesome colleagues, content to exploit a signature idea
or two, Wardlaw's aesthetic appetite seems unbounded. His passionate
exploration of modes and expressions has taken him in practice from
jewelry-making to painting to monumental sculpture; in subject matter
from lofty religion to humble apples to the rugged coast of Maine. He
has aptly described his art as a kind of collage...of different places,
times, experience, materials.
"In short, he has produced a rich and varied body of work whose scope defies the limits of a human lifetime, an output that resonates with the insights he has gained in the spiritual quest that eventually led him from Christianity to Judaism.
"If I were forced to choose among the Wardlaw works I could most rewardingly live with, I would settle on his haunting Maine series, begun in the 1990s and still going on. Distillations of land and sea forms in stark grays, blacks, and whites, they are by turns restless, calming, meditative, mysterious, gentle, thunderously foreboding. Responding to these formidable works, one feels acutely keyed in to the artist's anima, a deeply inspiriting encounter. Thank you, George, for giving your insights and feelings such powerful visual voice."
-Grace Glueck Grace Glueck served for many years as an art writer and critic for The New York Times.

