McCaffrey Fine Art is proud to present a survey exhibition of the work of William Scott. The first major overview of Scott’s work in New York in almost twenty years, it features thirty-five paintings and works on paper created between 1950 and 1986. The show opens on February 27 and continues through April 17, 2010. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1913 and reared in Northern Ireland, Scott received his art training in Belfast and London. An outward-looking soul in the often provincial London art scene, Scott was engrossed with developments in the arts of continental Europe and the United States throughout his career. While remaining faithful to the centuries-old genres of still life and the nude, he pursued innovation through the use of an intentionally awkward line, aggressive impasto, and flattened perspective, creating works that possess great subtlety and resonance.
Repeatedly marking, refining, erasing, adding, and deleting, Scott established a dialogue between subject, background, and genre, through which “an expression of an entirely different thing grows, a ‘figure into landscape’ or into a still life, ‘a man into a woman.’ ” This in-between-ness is at the heart of Scott’s work—as he once remarked, “I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and the erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life.”