Press Release

Heriard-Cimino Gallery presents Pandemonium in Arcadia, a series of paintings by James McGarrell. A reception to meet the artists will be held on Saturday, November 1st from 6 until 9 p.m. The public is invited. The exhibition will be on view from November 1 through November 30, 2003. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday 10:30-5:30, Saturday, 10-5, or by appointment.

About the exhibition: James McGarrell’s Pandemonium in Arcadia series are multi-part paintings set in Arcadian landscapes with titles referencing the ancient regions and islands of Greece. McGarrell’s multi-paneled, horizontal format allows his processional characters to flourish - dressed both in ancient and contemporary clothing, lines of maidens in white gowns, men and women in open-topped automobiles and on oxen, couples cavorting, banners waving, romance and motor cycles, muses and satyrs, banquets of food, musicians both ancient and contemporary. McGarrell brings us into his fictionalized word, capturing his characters’ disparate activities in their ongoing procession across the idealized landscape. These parades appear to have neither source nor destination, but come out of and go into an eternally repeated world unto themselves.

McGarrell discusses that the multi-paneled format of these two, three, four and five panel paintings create a visual structure that may infer the equivalent of movements in musical composition or stanzas in the printed poem. These variants allows for the reconfiguration of the painting, transforming not only the formal rhythms and spatial flow of the piece, but also the tensions and connections between images. McGarrell creates fiction on a grand scale, and applies his singular style of imagination, color andskill to animate these captivating and mysterious processions.

About the Artist: Soon after graduate school at UCLA James McGarrell was the youngest of 23 artists exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial “New Images of Man” exhibition in 1959. McGarrell has exhibited widely for more than forty years at galleries and museums in America and Europe. He was the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been exhibited in five Whitney Biennials, two Carnegie International Exhibitions, Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennale. In 1981 McGarrell joined the faculty of Washington University’s School of Fine Arts in St. Louis, Missouri, where he is now professor emeritus. His paintings are in the permanent collections of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Collection Nationale d’Art Contemporain at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1995 McGarrell received the Ernst lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. McGarrell works and resides in Vermont.