• services
• about
• news
• exhibits

Estates

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.

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.

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.