Chris Doyle: Dream of Arcadia

The Drawing Room in East Hampton is pleased to present "Chris Doyle: Dream of Arcadia", an exhibition of the artist’s new watercolors and animation, on view September 18 through October 25, 2004. The show features the most recent merging of two longstanding aspects of Doyle’s work, watercolor and video, in a monumental watercolor and related animation derived from it, along with a selection of twenty new watercolors from his ongoing Untitled House Series.

At the invitation of The Drawing Room, Doyle visited the East End this spring to gather raw material for the development of Extraordinary Perceptual Dilemmas and the Madness of Climbing, a watercolor measuring 46 x 78 inches. In this ambitious watercolor Doyle creates a twenty-first century allegorical landscape with a twist, borrowing from the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole, whose 1838 painting Dream of Arcadia inspired the title for the current show. The imagery for Extraordinary Perceptual Dilemmas includes an array of twentieth-century residential architecture, both observed and invented crowded into a hilly landscape with allusions to imperial ascension and decadence in statuary, triumphal arches and red, white and blue bunting. A sculptural group in the foreground appears to look back at their empire with pride, while a decaying tree hints that unraveling is to come.

 
See below for full press release and selected works.