The Mudhead Payoff
Charles Andresen
Exhibition: June 7 - July 13, 2014
Milwaukee, WI -- The Green Gallery is proud to present its first solo exhibition by Charles Andresen. The first of the so-called "throw paintings" were executed during the artist`s last year at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Spoonfuls of viscous acrylic were flung at the canvas, producing unforeseen patterns upon impact. Rather than an exercise in formalism, Andresen saw this method as an extension of Surrealist automatism and a way of discovering imagery through the process of painting. From 1992 until 2000 the surface designs were created by drawing fluid lines of color from squeeze bottles onto pigmented gel resting in a Tupperware container. This mass was then scooped up from beneath with a putty knife and deposited onto the horizontally tilted canvas.
Since 2000, lighter colored gel in the tub has been inscribed with darker paint on plastic utensils or polystyrene letters, which upon hitting the surface splay out into distorted lines. Through the decades Andresen's palette has ranged from black and white through pastel colors, earth tones, bright prismatic hues, metallic pigments, and even translucency. Since 2012 he has added the "nocturnes" composed of light colored lines atop deeper grounds.
For twenty five years Mr. Andresen has been employed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan where he continues to live and work.
Charles Andresen was born in Arizona in 1964. At an early age he was exposed to the culture, art, and rituals of the region`s Native American tribes. While still a teenager he became the art critic for Phoenix New Times, the local weekly newspaper. He moved to Philadelphia in order to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and train as a realist oil painter. However, while on the East Coast in the mid-1980s he became much more excited by the trends in current painting then being exhibited in New York City and moved there months after his PAFA graduation in 1988.