Willie Stewart at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

Artist: Willie Stewart

Exhibition title: Everything Has a Crack

Venue: Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, US

Date: January 21 – February 20, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Everything Has a Crack, Willie Stewart’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Willie Stewart’s still life and landscape paintings are long-resonating as they examine and classify time, memory, absence, and melancholy in relation to the visual culture of America. Informed by the conceptual tenets of the Pictures Generation, Pop Art, collage, and geometric realism, the artist juxtaposes images—both specific and undefined—into pseudo mise-en-scènes with nods to technology, music, art history and architecture.

The exhibition’s title derives from Leonard Cohen’s 1992 song “Anthem”; in the chorus, Cohen sings “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” For Stewart, songs, like paintings and images, are containers of meaning that morph over time as one’s own memory shifts and changes. In this case, Stewart mistakenly remembers the lyric as “everything has a crack,” underlining a humility and honesty in the work, as well as the effects of nostalgia—a feeling free from the obligation of remembering something completely as it was or is.

The paintings, works on paper, and sculptures on view in Everything Has a Crack demonstrate a practice rooted in faithful reproduction. In Still Life with Music (all works 2020), for example, Stewart uses colored pencil, gouache, and acrylic paint to assiduously render retro wood paneling, a 17^th century Dutch still life bouquet, a Depeche Mode EP cover, and a 1980s Gerhard Richter candle. These seemingly disparate images (alongside a ColorChecker, Renaissance-style window, and pumpkin) appear dimensionless within their sublime, twilight space, recontextualized and coexisting ambivalently.

As Josef Albers nested colors in his Homage to the Square, Stewart nests images. In Tulip, From Weeds…

Influence, and Sunset, single flowers or bouquets are set on top of, or within, various backgrounds: the gridded geometry of brick or cinderblock, masoned flagstone, and the grain of wood paneling. On top of these grounds, the artist mounts hand cut cotton and polystyrene board, altering the dimensionality of the picture plane. Stewart frequently architects his paintings with geometric delineations such as windowsills or thresholds, indicating interior and exterior frameworks.

Two bucket-bound wooden posts, one black and one blue, stand in the gallery with drawings affixed at their tops. “POSTED,” the black sign reads, followed by the first verse and refrain from The Smiths’ 1984 song “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” Across the room, blue monochromatic tulips begin to wilt atop the Xeroxed image of a German Romantic era landscape painting. These sculptures don’t so much provide explicit direction as they instead suggest paths forward into unraveling our associations with the markings of culture.

Willie Stewart (b. 1982, Gallatin, TN) lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. He received an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University (2018), and his BFA from The Cooper Union (2016). His work has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Morán Morán, Los Angles, CA (2019); Soft Opening, London, UK, with Grace Abholm (2018); and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, with Brent Stewart (2017). He has also exhibited at Motel, Brooklyn, NY (2016, 2015); Seed Space, Nashville, TN (2016); Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA (2015); and Herron College of Art and Design, Indianapolis, IN (2015). Stewart completed residencies at Pioneer Works (2016), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014).

Willie Stewart, Everything Has a Crack, 2021, exhibition view, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York

Willie Stewart, When You Sleep, 2019, Color pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m. vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 24w in

Willie Stewart, In Your Room (Reworked), 2020, Colored pencil and ink on cotton board, acrylic and u.m. vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 36w in

Willie Stewart, These Days, 2020, Colored pencil and ink on cotton board, acrylic and u.m. vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 84w in

Willie Stewart, The Beautiful Poem, 2020, Gouache and colored pencil on cotton board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 24h x 48w in

Willie Stewart, The Sky’s Gone Out, 2020, Gouache and colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 24w in

Willie Stewart, Tulip, 2020, Gouache and colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 24w in

Willie Stewart, Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, 2021, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic paint, epoxy resin, polyfoam, plywood, cement all, primer, industrial bucket, hardware, and miscellaneous lumber, 72h x 16w x 16d in

Willie Stewart, The Mirror, 2021, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic paint, epoxy resin, polyfoam, plywood, cement all, primer, industrial bucket, hardware, and miscellaneous lumber, 72h x 16w x 16d in

Willie Stewart, The Dark End of the Street, 2020, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 36w in

Willie Stewart, Still Life with Music, 2020, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 72w in

Willie Stewart, Harvest Moon, 2020, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 36w in

Willie Stewart, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, 2020, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 72w in

Willie Stewart, True Faith, 2020, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 36w in

Willie Stewart, New Order, 2020, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 60w in

Willie Stewart, From Weeds… Influence, 2020, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 72w in

Willie Stewart, Sunset, 2020, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 24w in

Willie Stewart, The Other One, 2020, Colored pencil on cotton board, acrylic and u.m vinyl on polystyrene board, and acrylic on canvas over panel, 36h x 72w in