DOUBLE VISION: Lawrence Tarpey & John Wilde

This exhibition brings together works by Lawrence Tarpey and John Wilde, two singular artists who share a commitment to representation, imbued with a healthy dose of Surrealist illogic: surprising juxtapositions, elements of desire and decay, and dreamlike scenarios merging reality and fantasy.

Based in Lexington, Kentucky, Lawrence Tarpey is known for his diminutively scaled and meticulously rendered compositions filled with human and animal imagery. His process entails covering prepared panels with ink or paint and then scraping the surface with sponges and razor blades until distinct biomorphic shapes and personages emerge. He develops these forms with continued acts of addition and erasure, until a sense of density and refinement is achieved.

Tarpey is represented here by several paintings that are as much drawn and inscribed as painted. Works such as The Night Life, Safe House BBQ, and Forty Nights Ago Today reveal mysterious scenes teeming with people and hybrid creatures engaged in darkly humorous dramas. Snapshot, Congo Powers, and Twenty Twenty Profiles picture more intimate encounters between two figures, or exaggerated portraits of quasi-human characters. Whether crowded and chaotic or sparse and interior, all of Tarpey's paintings hint at enigmatic narratives that resist clear resolution.  

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, John Wilde (1919–2006) is recognized as a celebrated artist and educator in the Midwest whose precise paintings and masterful drawings feature probing self-portraits, cavorting female nudes, expansive landscapes scattered with oddities, and various memento mori (skulls, fruit and vegetables, and flowers). Wilde, along with Gertrude Abercrombie, Marshall Glasier, Dudley Huppler, and Karl Priebe, became known for their engagement with Magic Realism, a subgenre of Surrealism. This regional cohort were part of a larger, national milieu that included artists such as Paul Cadmus and George Tooker.

Wilde's classic subjects are presented here in drawings, including Reclining Nude on a Log, and studies of animal skulls, disembodied fingers, and apples with grinning mouths. They give a sense of how common items can be fastidiously depicted and tilted towards the macabre. In two prints, Wildeview and Wildeview II, the artist depicts himself among his inventory of observed and invented protagonists and objects. His comment, "There is no good, no evil, only the thing in the moment. The marvelous beauty of the vista, just now, not later, and death claws at your flanks," is an apt description of these works, and his creative disposition.

Double Vision draws parallels between artists of different generations and distinct regions who nevertheless share an interest in transforming the familiar into psychologically charged worlds. This exhibition exemplifies one aspect of 2nd Story's mission: to situate artists within current and art historical dialogues and legacies.