James Bishop

Throughout his career, Bishop has engaged European and American traditions of post-War abstraction while developing a subtle, poetic, and highly unique visual language of his own. Alternating between and at times interweaving painting and drawing, Bishops works explore the ambiguities and paradoxes of material opacity and transparency, flatness and spatiality, as well as linear tectonics and loosely composed forms. In the early 1960s, Bishop developed the vocabulary of color and form that would characterize his paintings on canvas for over twenty years: a reduced but rich palette, the employment of subtle architectonic abstractions, and a aconsistently large, square format that reinforces the viewers sense of scale and space. By overlapping thin but radiant veils of monochrome color, Bishop creates discrete geometric frameworks that suggest doors, windows, cubes, or, as the artist describes, an uncertain scaffolding. Related to but distinct from his works on canvas, Bishops paintings on paper retain similarly monochrome palettes, while differing in their intimate scale and at times irregularly-shaped support. Devoting himself exclusively to this medium in 1986, Bishop was motivated by the idea that writing with the hand rather than with the arm might allow him to make something more personal, subjective and possibly original. In these delicately-rendered works, the traces of Bishops hand preserve their charge of personal and emotional resonance, achieving a grand inner scale and restrained monumentality.