Headbones Gallery Exhibits Robert Bigelow’s New Drawings

Written by Ricard Fogarty Tuesday, 07 February 2012 22:36

Vernon, BC - Robert Bigelow: C-RBB 6x6 2010 is part of an exhibition organized by Headbones Gallery that is on display at Ashpa Naira Gallery in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada.   Robert Bigelow’s recently accomplished work is a series of drawings - over two hundred - in less than a year - using just red, black and blue. His practice is a perfect example of inspired research. With the attention to detail often associated with the scientific method, Bigelow has executed a concentrated body of work that records the visual charting of his mind as carefully as an electroencephalograph. On view through 1 August.

He has recorded the aesthetic decisions of a carefully tended consciousness. Over time, he has elected to respond to variables in shape and composition while maintaining an identifiable ‘look’ – the identifiable style of a ‘Bigelow’ - a style that has been present in his work over the past forty years since he departed from a more confined expression that was aligned with surrealism and a California funk. The ‘Bigelows’ of the eighties, nineties and into the new millennium have displayed a fluid, energetic, open ended juicy exploration using the elements of abstraction. He relied more on form as manifest in shape, color or gestural markings than in line per se.

This new work, however, with obsessive cross hatching and outline, grant equal weight to line as he confines himself to two or three colors of ink. RBB 2010 (Red Black Blue) echoes the kookiness of the works from the seventies with a graffiti sensibility that comes across like an abstract tattoo. Quite often emblematic, the floating zaniness of Kandinsky (RBB23) comes to mind or the visual vocabularies of Leger (RBB36), Twombly (RBB41), Tchelitchew (RBB77), Miro (RBB08) and Ernst (RBB07), yet the over-riding effect of this series is more akin to contemporary than to modernism. These Bigelow creations relate back to the earlier work, the California funk and the absolute hip-ness of Bigelow’s perspective.

Bigelow has numbered each piece so that his permutations of slicing-and-dicing chart the chronology of his decisive directions. C-RBB 2010 presents one hundred drawings on paper, each 6 x 6 inches, done in red black and blue ballpoint pens.

Biography: Born 1940 in Los Angeles, California, artist and printmaker Robert Bigelow graduated in 1967 with a BFA (Major in Painting) from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. 

Robert Bigelow worked as a printmaker from 1971-1978 for prestigious American print houses such as Gemini G.E.L, Tyler Graphics, Cirrus Editions, Petersburg Press and the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. In addition to collaborating on print editions with artists: Josef Albers, Jim Dine, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Tony Onley, Man-Ray and Frank Stella; Robert Bigelow worked closely with Robert Motherwell on his paintings, collages and prints during a position as Motherwell’s Connecticut studio manager from 1975-1978. 

Returning to Canada in 1978, Bigelow worked until 1995 as Associate Professor and Associate Dean at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University in Montreal.  

With an extensive exhibition history, Robert Bigelow’s works have been collected by the Portland Art Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Pasadena Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum, Museum of Modem Art, National Gallery of Canada, Bank of Montreal, Shell Canada and Air Canada.  Robert Bigelow lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Richard Fogarty, Director

Headbones Gallery has been featuring artists since 1994. The recent mandate has been to emphasize contemporary drawing, sculpture and works on paper. A catalogue with written commentaries by Julie Oakes and occasional guest writers is produced in-house for most every exhibition. For additional information, please call 647.299.0341 or visit http://www.headbonesgallery.com .