Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Wilson. The exhibition marks Wilson’s ninth solo presentation with the gallery and will be on view from March 13 - April 24, 2021.

Patrick Wilson is an abstract painter and perceptualist, whose idiosyncratic work is imbued with such California movements as 'Hard Edge' and 'Light and Space,' and a keen discipline of observing and considering the ever-changing contemporary landscape.

Throughout his career, Wilson has continuously played with the idea of making paintings within paintings. For the past twenty years he has produced precisely layered super-flat paintings that seem at once both solid and transparent. And in his most recent works, the artist’s unique and masterful sense of materiality — fastidiously applied layers of acrylic paint — reveals an evolutionary step into further complex fields of color that resemble slow-moving atmospheric puzzles of light and space with no clear solution yet allowing for fluidity and openness. Often caught in a zone between extreme physical precision and optical ambiguity, Wilson’s work triggers not just curiosity, but the ability to perceive the beauty of refined complexity.

The exhibition features an array of works on canvas including a new series of paintings comprised of two panels slightly offset from one another — by minimally altering the shape and structure of these paintings Wilson gives a subtle nudge to the confines of the pure rectangle inviting further possibility, as well as a pronounced sculptural dynamic into his overall practice. Also included in the exhibition are a small group paintings from the artist’s Disrupted Grid series, wherein Wilson visually disrupts the idea of traditional geometry, considering the illusion of stability and our dependence upon it in our daily lives.

Along with the desire to push boundaries within his own practice of painting, Wilson’s compositions also provide threads of logic, pleasure, and whim — where color simply becomes the subject matter. Each piece is a wordless poem expressing its varying range of emotional sensations and tones — from the palatable hazy warmth found in the painting Saturday Walk to the syncopation of Modernist architecture found in the painting Inside Space to the yellow-violet bruising in Memory Code — Wilson’s abstract pictures are inspired by a visceral attraction to look and to see, as well as by the notion that everything is in transition, that change is constant, and that the act of seeing is very much a transient part of life.

Patrick Wilson (b. 1970, Redding, CA) received his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of California, Davis in 1993 and his Master of Fine Art degree at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA in 1995. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Evolving Geometries: Line, Form, and Color,” Moss Art Center at Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, VA; “Patrick Wilson: Pull,” University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA; “Slow Motion Action Painting,” Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, CA; and “Slow Food,” Curator’s Office, Washington, D. C. 

Recent group exhibitions include "Do You Think it Needs a Cloud," Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “20 Year Anniversary Exhibition,” Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; “The Responsive Eye Revisited: Then, Now, and In- Between,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Michael Reafsnyder & Patrick Wilson”, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Pivotal: Highlights from the Collection,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; “NO W-ISM: Abstraction Today” Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; “California Visual Music – Three Generations of Abstraction,” Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Orange, CA; “Electric Mud,” Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, TX; “Local Color,” San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, 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 many public and private collections including the Achenbach Collection, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, CA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; 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, CA; Minnesota; Museum of American Art, Saint Paul, MN; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art, Chapman University, Orange, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, CA. Patrick Wilson lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.