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Wixted, Kevin (born 1957) Metro 5 Oil on canvas 24 x 30 inches 2005

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Kevin Wixted
Born 1957

Wixted bestrides two worlds as a thoroughly contemporary urban artist with a deep appreciation for the Italian Renaissance. Following a sojourn in Italy in 2003, Wixted returned to New York to paint, superimposing his Italian experiences onto New York City’s skyline, with a new awareness of both and of the evolving nature of the urban environment. Working principally on wood panel, Wixted builds up layers of oil-and-wax pigment that impart depth and warmth across his surfaces. By turns dramatic, subtle, and playful, the resulting paintings create at times a sense of intense stillness and at others a sense of dynamic growth. Sometimes they playfully suggest that the complexities of urban planning can really be reduced to a tabletop of children’s building blocks.

In this, Wixted’s latest body of work, he “builds” his architecturally inspired paintings in stacks of vibrant, hard-edged rectangles against a solid-color sky. To one viewer, these patterned blocks of color may suggest the cut-stone towers of an Italian hill town against a brilliant sky; and to another, the view might be a glint of sunlight on the grid of a skyscraper. Both interpretations evoke the changing nature of “city.”