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October-November 2008 Groveland Annex Exhibition

Exhibition:                    Jerry Rudquist – In Retrospect

Dates:                           October 24 - November 29, 2008

                                    Opening Reception - Friday, Oct. 24 from 5-8 p.m.

Gallery Hours:               Tuesday - Saturday Noon to 5 p.m.

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Groveland Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of In Retrospect, an exhibition of paintings and prints by the late artist Jerry Rudquist. This exhibition marks the first time Rudquist's work has been available for purchase since his death in 2001. Jerry Rudquist's career spanned over four decades. A Minnesota native, he earned his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art in 1956 and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy in Michigan in 1958. He began an impressive teaching career at Macalester College in 1958 where he educated and influenced an uncountable number of talented and successful artists. During his career, Rudquist exhibited extensively locally and throughout the United States. His solo exhibitions included the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Rourke Gallery in Moorhead, the Kilbride Bradley Gallery in Minneapolis and at dozens of colleges across the United States. Loyal to his roots, Rudquist proudly exhibited his work year after year at the Minnesota State Fair, and in 2002 he was honored with a special retrospective at the State Fair Art Exhibition. Rudquist's work is included in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute and numerous corporate and private collections. 

            In Retrospect includes selections that will be both wonderfully familiar to Rudquist connoisseurs as well as exciting to people who are experiencing his work for the first time. Throughout his career, Rudquist frequently developed his paintings in series. Work from several of his most recognizable series will be featured including paintings from the Stonehenge Series, Chaos Series, and War Flower Series. There also will be several Head and Figure paintings, a theme Rudquist revisited throughout his career. Working in an improvisational style, these medium-sized paintings use side-by-side abstracted heads and figures to explore variations in form and energy. Known primarily for his forceful and seductive abstract paintings, Rudquist was a supremely skillful colorist. His images of purposefully ambiguous forms and spaces are defined by radical variations in color and surface texture. When small, such as the Stonehenge paintings, such images are luminous jewels that are simultaneously intimate and intense. With jarring shifts in value and hue, Rudquist created space, volume and definition. Seemingly contradictory, the surfaces are complex and intricate, yet their overall impression is nearly explosive.

There will be an opening reception for In Retrospect on Friday, Oct. 24 from 5-8 p.m. This exhibition and opening run concurrently with Dan Bruggeman – Compensation for a Permanent Loss in the main gallery. The exhibition continues through Nov. 29.