New Paintings

Alexandre Gallery presents a selection of new paintings by Tom Uttech completed over the past two years. Included is a monumental "reflection" painting - his largest to date of this deep-forest interior motif - and a large "migration" painting along with nine small paintings and recent watercolors. Uttech's landscape paintings depict the remote wilderness of the Precambrian Shield -- a vast expanse of land that spreads across southern Canada, Minnesota, and his native Wisconsin. Uttech renders woodlands, lakes, swamps, and rivers with a magical realist precision that illuminates the majesty of this precious landscape, part of the ancestral lands of the Ojibway people. Wildlife, including migrating birds, is often abundant, as M. Scott Momaday wrote in 2022 on Uttech's work, "A given painting . . . seems a concentration of nature itself. It teems with life, a sky full of birds, a foreground crowded with animals . . . " Presented in Uttech's own hand-made and painted frames, the works carry a luminosity and detail that invokes medieval altar pieces. Almost all works are set "in the crepuscular light of dawn and dusk." Uttech writes, "When I am there at this time of day and with a clean and empty mind a door opens for me to enter a state of tranquil ecstasy." This is an emotional state he seeks to entreat in the viewer as well. In this way the work of Tom Uttech vividly draws viewers into the untouched wilderness of the Northern United States, while conjuring from this environment an emotional exchange that is vital to the human experience and from which we are often removed. The resulting paintings, created in the studio based on imagination, memory and deep knowledge built on long periods of study in the environment surrounding Uttech's home in Wisconsin, are less-so depictions of specific locations than an imagined summoning of the experience of extended communion with the natural world. Tom Uttech was born in 1942 near Wausau, Wisconsin. He studied at Layton School of Art and University of Cincinnati before becoming a long-time professor at the University of Wisconsin. Since the inclusion of his paintings in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, Uttech's work has been the subject of over 40 solo exhibitions. He maintains his studio in a barn on his property north of Milwaukee and is engaged in restoring natural prairie to the surrounding area. His paintings are represented in major museum collections, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among many others.

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25 E 73rd St, Floors 2 & 3

Uptown, NY