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September 24 - November 3, 2010 Reception, Friday, October 1, 6-8 PM Nathan Oliveira- Paintings:1990/2010  Nathan Oliveira is the last surviving member of the famed San Francisco Bay Area Figurative Painters, which included Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, and Paul Wonner. These artists emerged on the West Coast in the late 1950's and were recognized for their expressionist use of paint and reintroduction of subject matter into abstraction. In 1959, Nathan Oliveira's paintings were selected for the groundbreaking exhibition, "New Images of Man", at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This exhibition identified "… a new pictorialization of the human image, often shattered and distorted".* It was at this same time that Oliveira developed what has become his signature style: a synthesis of figuration and abstraction, a lushness of color and an emphasis on gesture as a primary means of communication. The mysterious solitary figure, so often the subject of Oliveira's painting, is in the current exhibition represented by the largest painting, "Standing Figure, Looking Forward". This intimate exhibition includes many of the artist's major subjects. Nathan Oliveira was the head of the art department at Stanford University for many years. He has been the recipient of numerous distinguished awards. His work is in many major museum collections including the Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Chicago Art Institute, Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Nathan Oliveira has been represented by the Marsha Mateyka Gallery for twenty years. *Peter Selz, Nathan Oliveira, monograph by Peter Selz with essay by Joann Moser, accompanying traveling retrospective, 2002, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, p. 42 |
