Thaddeus Radell- In my beginning is my end: Recent Paintings

Bowery Gallery is pleased to present recent work by Thaddeus Radell, whose darkly luminous paintings evoke journeys through landscapes of the subconscious. From the artist’s richly layered surfaces—broadly troweled in places, elsewhere delicately incised— emerge visions of figures that appear and disappear within atmospheric depths. Bits of embedded burlap suggest a ragged dimension beyond paint. The heavy impasto, set against thinly brushed lines of saturated earth colors, creates living, breathing surfaces. In my beginning is my end. So reads the opening line of “East Coker,” the second poem comprising the “Four Quartets” of T.S. Eliot. Poetry, and the poems of Eliot in particular, have marked Radell’s recent paintings, which bear such titles as “Wandering the Waste Land,” “Gerontion,” and “The Hollow Men,” a group of four large panels. The exhibition includes larger works staggered between a number of small paintings of heads. These roughly hewn portrait studies might very well be, as Mark Kanter observed in his essay of 2021, “mugshots for the perpetrators” of the figures populating the larger compositions, where the heads exist only as masses of color. Radell is also currently represented by Thomas Deans Fine Art in Atlanta, GA and Alice Gauvin Gallery in Washington, DC. There will be an opening reception 3-6pm on Saturday, February 3. A closing reception wil be held on Saturday, February 24, following a cello performance by Robert Reed at 4pm and a conversation on art between the artist and Mark LaRiviere.