Imaginings | Wendell Arneson

Groveland Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Northfield, MN artist, Wendell Arneson. Arneson was a professor of fine art at St. Olaf College for 37 years, until his retirement in 2015. He has exhibited his work throughout the region for over 40 years. His paintings are part of numerous collections including Ford Motor Company, Prudential Life Insurance, 3M Corporation, US Bank, General Motors Corporation, Princeton University and the Hillstrom Museum of Art.

Arneson’s work is exciting and intelligent, giving reference to landscape, deconstructed and reassembled into planes of warm and cool color. Working in both large and small scale, these expressionist paintings have a surface of fluid brushwork and movement. Of his work, Arneson writes:

“I am interested in work that resides in both objective and non-objective worlds. I am equally attracted to gestures and non-descriptive marks as well as the power and ambiguity of symbols and images. Painting inhabits a place between the known and the unknown. My work draws from an inventory of images that make multiple, yet varied references allowing for content to shuffle, reinvent, and remake itself. Art, for me, does not provide answers but rather provokes questions and seeks possibilities. As an image-maker, I am interested in the intersection of figuration and abstraction.

“Land imagery honors a specific location while also seeking, through abstraction, multiple layers of entrance and ambiguity for the viewer. What matters most is to create a painterly dialogue between image, shape, color, tactile surface, and space. The end result, the painting, evokes a journey of discovery and imagining.”

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