Douglas Witmer--Call and Response
January 13 - March 5, 2023
I will present an artist talk on Thursday, February 2, and be in attendance for the Museum's Winter Party on Friday, February 3.
Here is the Museum press release:
The exhibition “Douglas Witmer – Call and Response” is a multi-faceted project that highlights the artist’s recent work, while demonstrating the integral relationship between an artist and a museum and the dialogues artists form with art that comes before them. For this exhibition, the Museum invited Witmer to curate works from the collection to be installed in conversation with his work. Witmer created several new large-scale paintings for this show. And the Museum is proud to publicly debut Witmer’s major 2020 work “Forty, For You,” a 40-piece suite of paintings and original music compositions intended as a contemplative experience.
Witmer’s relationship to The Midwest Museum of American Art began in the early 1990s when, as a student at Goshen College, he met, studied-under and occasionally assisted MMAA director Brian Byrn, forming an ongoing friendship. Since then Witmer has become internationally-known within the field of reductive abstract painting, steadily pursuing what he calls “a personal inquiry” into the materiality of the painted object.
Regarding his recent work, Witmer says, “My enduring subject is the exploration of painted presence. I consider each painting a unique place offering an open invitation into a contemplative experience of seeing and feeling. I achieve this using a highly process-driven approach within the framework of a kind of formalist abstraction. I activate elemental compositions with sensuous color and improvised and incidental actions. Working in thin watery layers, I establish rectilinear structures that I subject to accident-like situations where resulting marks cannot be expected or anticipated. The fluidity of the paint and my process sets up challenging dynamics of control and release. In my painting I calibrate the tension of these dynamics towards expressive outcomes.”