DCCA: Exhibitions: Beckler Family Members’ Gallery

Andrew Wapinski
Wasteland
Beckler Family Members' Gallery
January 19 - April 18, 2010

Andrew Wapinski reveals a love of materials
and process that is tangible and clearly visible
in his work. He utilizes this love to create large
works that suggest a sense of history at the
same time that they refer to the post-industrial
landscape. This series of paintings, entitled
Wasteland, utilizes large areas of gold foil, which
allude to Byzantine icon paintings. Wapinski also
builds up layers of paint and glaze, which emerge
through veils of color, with areas submerged and
emerging, suggesting paint loss. The final surface
is one that both reveals and obscures forms.

Wapinski feels that “gold is a symbol for the
attainment of knowledge, wealth, and power,”
which he connects to the human desire to
dominate and organize nature. Many of the
compositions suggest the peeling paint of old
industrial buildings. However, they also contain a
certain majesty that connects them to the great
religious paintings of the past. The title of the
series implies the leftover architectural structures
that are the result of human attempts to dominate
and control the natural environment. In fact, the
artist finds that he is exploring the struggle
between progress and nature, a topic visited
most famously by the American painter Thomas
Cole in the nineteenth century with his series
entitled The Course of Empire.

Utilizing gold and metallic surfaces, which he
scars with incised lines and overlays of soot and
powder pigments, Wapinski chooses to reflect the
natural process of decay and the cyclical course
of civilization. Like Cole, who many see as one of
the early conservationists, Wapinski is fascinated
with civilization’s imprint on nature and the effects
of progress on the environment. The difference, of
course, is that Wapinski is a painter of very large
abstract compositions that emerge out of the
great modernist tradition of artists like Wassily
Kandinsky and Mark Rothko. Wapinski shares
Kandinsky’s revealing and obscuring of forms
from nature and Rothko’s attempt to represent the
abstract concept of the sublime. Yet, there is
something quite different about Wapinski’s
paintings than those of the great modern masters.
Wapinski employs pigmented epoxy resin in the
final layers, which suggest a depth of surface and
a plastic kind of facade that represents the
contemporary period. Wapinski bridges the
modern with the postmodern, exploring through a
meticulous process the post-industrial landscape
of the twenty-first century. He connects process
with concept in a sophisticated series of large
abstract works that explore the human imprint on
nature. Wapinski’s works also demonstrate the
important role that abstract painting continues to
play in contemporary art.

J. Susan Isaacs, PhD
Professor and Coordinator of Art History
Curator of the Departmental Galleries
Department of Art + Design, Art History, Art Education
Towson University
Curator of Special Projects, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts