Talley Dunn Gallery is presenting The Imaginary Still Life of William Bailey, the gallery’s third exhibition of paintings by the renowned American artist. The show will be on view from Jan. 10 through Feb. 23 in the Project Gallery.Long celebrated for his pristine paintings of vessels arranged on table tops or ledges below large expanses of muted toned walls, William Bailey paints all the various cups, bowls, jugs and other objects featured within his still life compositions completely from memory, not from the direct observation of a posed placement of objects. Created with a sense of timelessness that sets the paintings outside a specific period or place, Bailey presents his compositions against a monochrome expanse of wall, which further removes the works from any suggestion of an actual setting. Featured paintings in the exhibition with titles such as Straniero (“stranger” or “outsider” in Italian) and Sentinel also add to the sense of austere mystery suggested by Bailey’s fabricated worlds.
The viewer has the same experience when viewing one of Bailey’s paintings with female figures. Delicately crafted with the same detail and steady hand as the still lifes, the women depicted in the artist’s works are not models but are also painted entirely from imagination. Posed sitting or standing in strange interiors and gazing directly at the viewer, such as the young women does in the painting House by the Sea, the female figures appear as weightless apparitions in their imaginary spaces.
Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, William Bailey now resides in Connecticut and Italy. He received both his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Yale University, and since then has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. Bailey is Professor of Art Emeritus at Yale University. He is a member of The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and has served on the board of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art since 2000. Bailey was appointed as a trustee for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in 1970. Bailey has an extensive exhibition history, and his works appear in numerous public and private collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; among many others.
FTalley Dunn Gallery is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment.
