Kansas City, MO - Throughout his long and prolific career, Wayne Thiebaud has utilized a broad range of printmaking techniques to explore the formal and conceptual concerns found in his well-known paintings of familiar objects and cityscapes. Everyday Delights: Prints by Wayne Thiebaud, on view now through July 13 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, provides a concise perspective on the artist’s explorations in printmaking, featuring color lithographs, hand-painted etchings, and an artist’s book of dry-point etchings titled Delights (1964–65), all drawn from the permanent collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition is on view in the Kemper Museum’s galleries at Kemper East, 200 E. 44th Street, Kansas City, Missouri. Admission to the exhibition is free.

The simple, graphic quality of Thiebaud’s still lifes of commonplace foods, such as pies, sardines, and club sandwiches, suggests his beginnings in the food service industry and as a cartoonist and illustrator. His images of repeating rows of sweets and savories not only mirror countertop displays, but also evoke the formal rigidity and seriality found in Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s. And while his fascination with everyday subjects is often compared to Pop art and interpreted as a commentary on America’s abundance of mass-produced goods and consumer-driven culture, his sumptuous still lifes also convey a profound sense of nostalgia for the ordinary and overlooked. Frequently painted from memory, his still lifes of orderly groupings or lone objects are fragmented from their original context—perhaps a diner countertop or bakery window display— encouraging an awareness and contemplation of the intrinsic beauty found in the mundane. And like traditional still lifes, Thiebaud’s bountiful displays of delicacies and wonders are instilled with an underlying foreknowledge of life’s transitory nature.

Several prints in the exhibition also illustrate Thiebaud’s interests in the urban landscape of San Francisco. After moving to a hilltop home in 1972, Thiebaud began to focus on the Bay Area’s extraordinary architecture and vertigo-inducing streets. Prints such as Night Ridge (1987) and City Edge (1988) present the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface and demonstrate Thiebaud’s signature style of multiple focal points, contrasting light and shadow and hot and cool colors, resulting in vibrant surfaces that reflect the energized streets of San Francisco.

All the works are a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Paul LeBaron Thiebaud, except for one, which is a gift of Senator and Mrs. Thomas F. Eagleton.

About the Kemper Museum

Kansas City’s renowned free modern and contemporary art museum, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in October 1994 and draws more than 120,000 visitors each year. The Museum boasts a rapidly growing permanent collection of modern and contemporary works of artists from around the world. Permanent collection artists include Louise Bourgeois, Dale Chihuly, Petah Coyne, Nan Goldin, Willem de Kooning, Hung Liu, Morris Louis, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O’Keeffe, Tom Otterness, Jaume Plensa, Matthew Ritchie, and Wayne Thiebaud. The Museum hosts temporary exhibitions, installations, performance work, film and video series, lectures, concerts, children’s workshops, and other creative programs designed to both entertain and challenge. Visit : www.kemperart.org/