Acquavella Galleries Palm Beach Presents “Wayne Thiebaud” On View December 20, 2020 – February 20, 2021

“[Painting] is a wonderful combination of memory, imagination, and direct observation. A lot has to do with yearning. Primarily, what I’m interested in and always have been is this wonderful, personally involving search to find out all I can about painting, to be willing to take risks, and try things that don’t seem to be logical, and find out how my feelings and experiences as a boy growing up in America can be reflected in a painting.”

– Wayne Thiebaud

Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present Wayne Thiebaud from December 20 through February 20 at its new Palm Beach location. The exhibition serves as a compact retrospective of the distinguished American painter, who celebrated his 100th birthday this fall. Featuring 19 works ranging from 1964-2020, the exhibition will be the first dedicated to a living artist in Acquavella’s Palm Beach gallery.

Wayne Thiebaud features many of the most celebrated subjects from the artist’s career. From iconic paintings of sundaes, candies and cakes to striking, vertiginous cityscapes of San Francisco and luminous riverscapes of the Sacramento River Delta, Thiebaud reimagines American subjects and vistas in vibrant colors and unique perspectives. Today, seventy years after his first solo exhibition, he continues to produce new work and push his exploration beyond the subjects that have captivated him since the 1960s.

In several of his recent works, such as Cupcake Window (2018/2020) and Courtland Reservoir (2019/2020), Thiebaud revisits some of his most familiar themes, which he approaches in new ways through his choices of composition, palette, perspective, and technique. In Cupcake Window, Thiebaud paints rows of neatly arranged cupcakes, their frostings characteristically rendered in thick impasto, from a different perspective. The vantage point set from within the bakery, the viewer looks both at and over these delicious rows of treats which are placed in the foreground against the large, abstract expanse of the shop window. The painting unexpectedly becomes at once a study of geometric abstraction and of lusciously rendered form. In Courtland Reservoir, Thiebaud represents the watery landscape and farmlands of the Sacramento River Delta in vivid, candy-colored hues. Masterfully employing impasto, the artist applies thickly rendered paint to give life to the trees and their dramatically cast shadows, and also pulls the medium across the luminous cobalt pool of the reservoir to evoke the rippling surface of the body of water.

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue will accompany the exhibition and will include an introduction by Eleanor Acquavella.

Contact: David Simantov