Rackstraw Downes exhibition opens at Parrish Art Museum

“Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972–2008,” the first major survey of work by the British-born, Yale-educated artist who has been painting the American landscape and urban vistas for 35 years, will open at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton on Sunday, June 20, and remain on view through August 8.

Mr. Downes, Parrish Art Museum Robert Lehman Curator Klaus Ottmann, and Parrish Executive Director Terrie Sultan will discuss the artist’s work at an opening reception on Saturday, June 19, at 6 p.m. in the concert hall, with wine and hors d’oeuvres at a reception to follow.

Reservations are required for the discussion; tickets are $10, or free for Parrish members; call 283-2118, ext. 41.

Organized by Mr. Ottmann, the exhibition features 25 major works ranging from Mr. Downes’s earliest plein-air paintings executed in Maine to his later signature paintings of the vast panoramas near his homes in Presidio, Texas, and New York City.

Recipient of a 2009 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, Mr. Downes, who was born in England in 1939, developed his panoramic style by studying 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. His minutely detailed, oil-on-canvas landscapes invite viewers to reconsider the intersection between the natural world and man-made objects.

Turning from abstract painting in the early 1960s, and encouraged by the work of fellow painters Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver, and Jane Freilicher, Mr. Downes has pursued a unique approach to realism that defies standard categorization. He begins each work with drawings and oil sketches before meticulously painting on site in order to capture the precise details of lighting and weather. In some instances, he has spent many months completing a single piece.

Rejecting picturesque views characteristic of much realist work, he paints landscapes depicting scenes generally overlooked or dismissed for lack of a traditional aesthetic appeal. His subjects range from the roadways, urban detritus, and industrial backyards of the East Coast to the oil fields and vast, empty terrain of Texas. In painting the American landscape as it is, not as it has been idealized, Mr. Downes strives to imbue seemingly ordinary subjects with extraordinary power.

In an interview with Ms. Sultan, the painter said, “It’s fair to say that I’m a sort of realist, and that my focus is generally on the man-made or man-modified environment.”

In his catalog essay, “The Verity of Art: Rackstraw Downes’s Onsite Paintings,” Mr. Ottmann observed that “it would be hard ... to discern any 19th-century romanticism in locations [he has chosen]; it is a sentiment rarely in evidence in Downes’s work.”

Mr. Downes’s has written highly regarded essays on visual and literary artists as varied as John Constable, Fairfield Porter, and Samuel Beckett. His work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among many others. His essays have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Art in America, and Art Journal.

The exhibition catalogue, published by D Giles Limited of London, includes essays by exhibition curator Klaus Ottmann and concert pianist and director of Da Camera of Houston Sarah Rothenberg, as well as a wide-ranging interview between the artist and Ms. Sultan.

“Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972–2008” will travel to the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine, where it will open December 15, and to the Weatherspoon Art Museum of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where it will open May 21, 2011.

Two other Downes exhibitions will be presented this summer in the tri-state area. “Rackstraw Downes: A Selection of Drawings: 1980–2010” will be on view at the Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York City through July 30. The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, will show “Rackstraw Downes: Under the West Side Highway” from June 27 through January 2, 2011.

The Parrish Art Museum publication and exhibition have been made possible through a generous grant from the Lannan Foundation, with additional support provided by Rex Auchincloss, Philip H. Isles, Francis H. Williams, and an anonymous donor.