Installation Views - Bob Thompson: Fantastic Visions, Paintings & Drawings - November 5, 1998 – January 9, 1999 - Exhibitions

Bob Thompson: Fantastic Visions, Paintings & Drawings explores the figurative expressionist work of Bob Thompson. This exhibition features important paintings as well as a selection of rare drawings, representing some of his notable friends from the Beat culture including Red Grooms, Gandie Brody, Cannonball Adderly and Thelonious Monk.

In his short life of less than twenty-nine years, Bob Thompson proved to be an artist of great integrity, significance and profound influence. By the early 1960s, he had achieved great recognition which was unparalleled for most young artists and unprecedented for African-American artists of his generation. For Bob Thompson, painting was a catharsis as he passionately improvised with color, pouring his soul into often autobiographical and allegorical expressions. Thompson’s explosive paintings weave figures and landscapes into a tapestry of color and are deeply rooted in tradition. Thompson regularly

appropriated from the Old Masters, including Francisco de Goya, Nicolas Poussin, and Piero della Francesca, adopting their compositions and classical subjects as the basis for his works. By combining his own visionary style and bold color sense with tradition, Thompson succeeded in producing distinctive works which stand very much alone in twentieth-century art.

This exhibition coincided with the Bob Thompson retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Bob Thompson.

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