Chicago-based painter Don Pollack has exhibited at Marcia Wood Gallery since 1996 and exhibits regularly in New York, Chicago and Calgary, Canada. His public collections include the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, Republican Governors Association, Washington, D.C. and Alston & Bird, Washington, D.C., among others, as well as many significant private collections.

Don Pollack is recognized nationwide as a leading practitioner of landscape painting, an artist whose hauntingly lyrical and conceptually challenging compositions stand as a vital contemporary link in the long chain of American landscape painting. Pollack’s work has been compared to, and exhibited among, such respected American masters as Beirstadt, Church and Inness, as well as contemporaries Stephen Hannock, Thomas Woodruff and David Kroll. Critic Jerry Cullum of the Atlanta Journal Constitution writes “This is incredibly beautiful landscape painting with a serious intellectual dimension plus an occasional humorous twist.”

Pollack’s paintings frequently inject references to photography, stimulating a dialogue between the two forms, and questioning the objectivity of any form of documentation. Frequently the scenery will explode with saturated color, a vibrant juxtaposition of hyper-real and surreal that skirts the edges of disbelief. Almost always the scene is at the transitional time of day from light to dark, or vice versa.

In his latest body of work Pollack introduces yet another conceptual twist to tickle the brain and subvert the expected. He is placing his sumptuously rendered, photo-realistic, Hudson River school landscape paintings of obscure and unremarkable objects and scenes in that most mysterious and introspective of times and light – deepest night. Just as we begin to venture into the shrouded realm he has created, to discover what lies within, we are startled into a new contemplation of space by yet another addition to Pollack’s vocabulary. In his ongoing work of keeping traditionally rendered landscape painting vibrant and meaningful as a contemporary art form, in some of the latest paintings Pollack explores the tension that arises from skewing the traditional horizontal landscape within a frame, by painting the image inside a trapezoidal shape which is then set in a right-angled canvas, the dark shape’s borders contrasting starkly against the bright white background of the rectangle.