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February Issue 2007
Corrigan Gallery in Charleston, SC, Offers Works by Manning Williams
The
Corrigan Gallery in Charleston, SC, is excited to present works
by Manning Williams in a show entitled, Fragmenting Arrogance,
which opens on Feb. 8. The show continues through Feb. 28, 2007.
How does one describe life? Is it full of laughter, confusing, a tragedy or a game to be played? These words simultaneously speak of the paintings of Williams. In an abstraction of life, comedy, tragedy and pop art he has used cartoon or comic formats of windowpane-like boxes and dialogue balloons (empty ones) bringing to mind the works created in the sixties, the books of youth, stain glass windows and warlike imagery all in one.
Showing since the mid 1960s (Carolina Galleries), one searches Williams' early portraits, the large and small landscape works, his Indian series that was followed by trucks and his southern narratives with the canoeist as viewer, to find the common threads.
Why chose the cartoon approach? Williams feels that art is often arrogant and that museums and great collections can isolate ordinary people from art. Susan Davidson writing for the Guggenheim describes the beginnings of pop art. "The term 'Pop art' was first used in print in 1958 to label the manifestations of popular culture (television, advertising, billboards, magazines) as distinguished from high culture. In turn, the consumer industry itself adopted Pop art as an antidote to the rigidity of high art." Williams would have been nineteen years old when this occurred. It would have surrounded him and edged into his subconscious.
"The narrative or epic impulse of Abstract Expressionism" described by Davidson is clearly evident in Williams' work over the last forty years. "I consider myself a narrative painter. Yet times have changed the way we see the world. TV, movies, and the Internet pour out information faster than we could have ever imagined only a few years back. My work today is about finding a new way to narrate our times," said Williams.
Arshile Gorky, an abstract expressionist painter believed that "Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes . . . . Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas."
Seeking entrée into "unknown areas" and a way to bring all people into those areas certainly answers the why question of Williams' approach. His new body of work is abstract yet one can find many figurative aspects in it and a strong thread connecting this body of paintings to his earlier figurative work and sense of composition.
Williams was born in Charleston in 1939. He received his BS from the College of Charleston before doing graduate work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Williams's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with solo shows in Charleston, New Orleans, Washington, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Art and the Greenville Museum of Art. Group shows including his work were Second Story Show at Piccolo Spoleto in 2002, 100 Years/100 Artists, Views From the 20th Century, at the South Carolina State Museum in 1999-2000, and Old South, New South at Winthrop College in 1995. In 2004, Williams and Linda Fantuzzo had a duo show at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston.
Williams has received a SC Arts Commission Fellowship. His most known commissions are displayed at the Charleston Airport and the East Cooper Hospital. His poster for the New Figurative Painting exhibition is included in "Fairfield Porter: A catalogue raisonné of his prints." Williams produced the book jacket and illustrations for Poems from the Scorched Earth by James Everett Kibler (2001).
William's work has been the subject of reviews and feature stories, and included in the video Charleston Art Now. His work hangs in public and corporate collections, among them the SC Arts Commission, R.J. Reynolds Corporation, Citizens and Southern National Bank, Post & Courier Publishing Company, Kiawah Resort Association, Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina State Museum and the Gibbes Museum of Art.
For further information check our SC Commercial
Gallery listings, call the gallery at 843/722 9868 or visit (www.corrigangallery.com).
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