DOG STAR knows the paintings of Martin Wong will inspire you and deeply affect you. Go to P.P.O.W. Gallery on West 25th Street before the show closes on January 31.
Do not cheat yourself and rely solely on images on the gallery website. Martin paints deeply emotional and stirring images that must be appreciated up close and face-to-face with the actual paintings.
Why do we feel this way about Martin's pictures? Two reasons: the things Martin paints have a deep sadness to them but also much dignity - these are not people (prisoners, regular folks, street artists) and places (prisons, abandoned city street blocks, East Village tenements) asking for anybody's sympathy or permission to exist.
And, Martin is a very good painter who knows his strengths and avoids art tricks that would make his work artificial or fake (an example of an artist who IS like this: Julian Schnabel - who has no painterly talent at all and relies on color and collage to express anything at all).
Martin creates a universe that is also entirely his own private world: every time we look at one of his paintings we notice something fresh and new. This can only be possible if the artist has embedded - intentionally and unintentionally - little secret messages, signs and symbols.
For Martin this is exactly what he does: while his lines and colors have enduring impact, he also includes American Sign Language to spell out a message - literally!
Martin Wong, who died in 1999 due to an AIDS related illness, was born in 1946 in Portland, Oregon and moved to New York City in 1978. He received a degree in ceramics, but decided to become a painter when he was thirty years old.
For most of his time in NYC, Martin Wong stayed nestled in the Lower East Side, enmeshed in the fabric of his neighborhood and the people around him. His work has traditionally been described as a document of that time in the 1980's and 1990's, capturing a moment in the history of the city marked by vacant lots, graffiti and a burgeoning club culture.
Martin Wong wanders through an urban landscape and refashions it into something new. His paintings take us inward, through a hidden, alternative landscape of longing and deeply felt subjectivity. Following this logic of desire, a crumbled brick tenement can become laced with the erotic or a painting of a single cactus can carry all the restrained passion of an unmet gaze from a sexy stranger.
Also on view are several rarely seen photo collages on loan from The Fales Library archives as well as drawings and sketches. These photos are remarkable for the fact that they not only exist as source material for some of the larger paintings but also as a rare document of the long walks the artist would take in and around the Lower East Side.
The vacant lots have long since been filled in, but don't let the glass facades fool you. There is always the torn seam or frayed edge... you just need to know where to look.
P.P.O.W. Gallery is EASY TO REACH:
511 West 25th Street (3rd floor)
at 10th Avenue
Chelsea - Manhattan 10001
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