Metaphors & Symbols, a solo exhibition by Alan Loehle at Marcia Wood Gallery
A solo exhibition by Alan Loehle, entitled Metaphors & Symbols, of new figurative paintings and abstract drawings at Marcia Wood Gallery. Loehle was the 2007 recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting.

ALAN LOEHLE

January 8 - February 14, 2009

Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of new figurative abstract oil paintings, and a new drawing series, by Alan Loehle. This will be the first exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery by Loehle since 2004. Alan Loehle lives and works in Atlanta. In the spring of 2007 he received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting, Other notable awards include, beginning in 1985, two Pollock-Krasner Grants for Painting, an NEA Fellowship for Painting, and an Elizabeth Foundation Grant for Painting.

Alan Loehle has been exhibiting since 1983. Gallery exhibitions include Atlanta, Chicago and New York, among others, as well as numerous museum exhibitions including The Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC, The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AK, The Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL, The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, The Montgomery Museum of Art, Montgomery, AL, The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, GA, The Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL and The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA-GA), Atlanta, GA. He was featured in a print exhibition of drawings in The Paris Review in 1999, and his work is in the collections of the Arkansas Arts Center and the Reading Museum, Reading, PA, among others.

The Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Alan Loehle created during his Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 – 2008.

The paintings are a continuation of Loehle’s previous work, drawing on singular powerful images of dogs and an achondroplastic dwarf, that serve as metaphors for the fragility and transience of life, reminders of why we should pay attention to ephemeral moments of life.  These new paintings have a shimmering resonance that is mysterious and provocative and invite the viewer to confront the beauty and raw elegance of human existence.  These works ask us if we can exist alone with our vulnerabilities, then usher us to the threshold of our own instinctual humanity where we can find sympathy and innocence in response to the pathos of the fleeting moment.
The new Rome series of drawings embrace with bold immediacy the way the human experience is woven together across culture and time.  These drawings approach similar existential themes as in the paintings, this time asking if we can exist in a complex world of allusion, custom, and shared memory, thus reinventing the inward journey of Alan’s paintings through twists and scratchings and bouncings of richly layered symbols.  Where the paintings capture and save a moment, preserving it against the movement of time, the new drawings envelop us in a wealth of universal imagery, suggesting that no moment is ever completely lost, but packed densely into our experience and affirmation of life.

This series is the result of time spent in Italy during the Guggenheim Fellowship, where he was inspired to explore new vocabularies in his work. Imagery includes symbols of fertility and death, the Belvedere Torso, the phallic exit sign for the brothel outside the Coliseum, animals from the Rome zoo, gypsies, and graffiti from bridges over the Tiber River.