As a perceptualist painter, Patrick Wilson creates hard-edge paintings that reflect seductive improvisations on radiant color and meticulous structure. In lineage with John McLaughlin, Fred Hammersley, and Karl Benjamin, he incorporates a fascination with the history of California hard-edge painting, light and space, and fetish finish into intensely colorful paintings of varying planes and opacities through fastidiously applied layers of acrylic paint. Over the past twenty years, Wilson’s works have continued to evolve with complexity and finesse through a consistently immaculate process of creating super-flat surfaces that seem at once both solid and transparent.
Finished paintings are pristine, but also carry evidence of the artist’s hand—a subtle bloom of color along an otherwise flawlessly straight line, a slight whimsy in the corner of a square—always inviting the viewer to slow down and examine their nearly sculptural surfaces. Wilson unleashes the full force of color, while offering optically ephemeral experiences through seemingly destabilized constellations of ever-shifting opaque and translucent planes.
Patrick Wilson was born in 1970 in Redding, CA and lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of California, Davis in 1993 and his MFA degree at Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, CA in 1995.
He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Evolving Geometries: Line, Form, and Color, Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA; and Patrick Wilson: Pull, University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA. Recent group exhibitions include Pivotal: Highlights from the Collection, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; On the Road: American Abstraction, David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI; Geometrix: Line, Form, Subversion, Curator’s Office, Washington, D.C.; California Visual Music – Three Generations of Abstraction, Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Orange, CA; 2010 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Keeping it Straight: Right Angles and Hard Edges in Contemporary Southern California, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA; and Gyroscope, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.
His work is included in such permanent collections as the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; and the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA.
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Selected Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
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Bibliography
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Public Collections