Rex Lau: Recent Paintings

The Drawing Room in East Hampton is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Rex Lau, on view from January 13th through March 12th, with a reception on Saturday, January 14th from 4 to 6 pm. In this new series of small oil paintings on panel Lau returns to the subject of landscape. A selection of related pastel drawings will also be available.

Lau has lived at the eastern tip of Long Island since his move to Montauk in 1979. The impact of place on his work has been associated with American Modernist landscape painters such as Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley. Like these Modernist icons, Lau’s ability to distill the essence of a physical experience into a formal composition that stands on its own as abstraction is striking. In the case of this series, which began in 2003, Lau started with a group of black and white paintings on panel characterized by a high horizon line broken by two or three black rock-like forms, which crop out of serpentine linear fields. As the series evolved, Lau introduced color, which lends powerful vibrancy to some paintings and subtle tonal shifts to others that are heightened by mottled brushwork. In the oil pastels, which came after the paintings, Lau began a black under-drawing, covered the entire surface with white and then scratched away the top surface to reveal the black lines.

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