The Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by painter, Thornton Willis. The exhibition will be up from October 27 through December 22, 2018, and is accompanied by a catalog and title essay by acclaimed poet and art critic, John Yau.

In his essay for the show, Yau discusses the artist’s use of color and geometry, stating:

This is where the power of his (Willis’s) painting resides- in the merging of color and geometry—which is particularly apparent in his recent canvases. Done in acrylic, these paintings, whose modest dimensions measure either 20 by 16 or 18 by 14 inches, strike me as among the best that Willis has made in recent years.

Willis, who turned 82 this year, remarkably continues exploring pure abstraction’s possibilities and pushing at the limits in ways that has led art critic and executive editor of The New Criterion, James Panero, to write,” Willis’s painting’s engagement with the viewer is entirely contemporary. He is a master at what he does. He is at the top of his game.”

Recognizing the dynamism that this work exudes, Yau likens Willis’s new paintings to the improvisations in jazz music:

He (Willis) renovates and shifts his structures over the course of discovering where improvisation will take him. What is unexpected-for this viewer, at least- is the revelation of how fully the tension between order and invention in Willis’s forms can be read aesthetically, politically, and socially. The effectiveness of these abstract paintings as metaphors of disruption-even resistance…

This exhibition coincides with the release by Greenpoint Press Art Books of Thornton Willis: Interviews and Essays, a book that covers the artist’s upbringing and education in the Deep South and his career in New York City with 215 color reproductions and 30 black and white photographs. Advance copies will be available at the opening.