PRESS RELEASE
Opening Reception:
Saturday, November 2nd from 6 to 8 PM
(Los Angeles) – Edward Cella Art + Architecture is pleased to announce William Dole: Selected Collages, a focused survey of collages and early drawings of artist William Dole (1917 – 1983). In a departure for the gallery, the exhibition offers insight into the oeuvre of a highly recognized practitioner of collage in the 20th Century. Representing the artist’s first solo exhibition in more than twenty years, the gallery’s Project Room is installed as a focused survey of his work ranging from early drawings to later colleges. As a tenured professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Dole influenced many young artists with his visual and metaphoric collages, including the artist Mary Heebner, a student of Dole’s whose exhibit The Venus Paintings will run concurrently.
An abstractionist, Dole was experienced in oil, watercolor, and ink; however it was for his collage that be became widely known. Collage, for Dole, offered him the control and flexibility to create poetic visual statements, and he seized on the opportunity to test various combinations of shape and color with array of found papers and ephemera, each with their own physical behavior and visual quality. Unlike many of his colleagues, Dole had interest in the physical properties of paper and sought out 19th century bills, maps and ephemera, old handwritten letters, specimens of marbleized paper, eschewing photographs and common commercial reproductions. A self- described “voracious looker,” Dole sought to translate the world around him though his delicate, meticulously rendered collages into both phenomenal and symbolic objects connecting past and present.
In his obituary in the New York Times, John Russell writes, “Mr. Dole's works were mostly quite small, but they commanded attention from the outset by reason of the authority with which he put them together and the firm architectural structure that he could give to scraps of printed matter that in themselves were merely fragmentary.”
William Dole earned his graduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1947. Dole was widely exhibited including solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the De Young Memorial Museum, the La Jolla Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art among others galleries and museums. His works are held in the public collections of the Hirshhorn Collection at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C., Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., The Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, Oakland Museum, Oakland, California; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego among others.
Special Exhibition Program
Exhibition Talk with Mary Heebner
Join Mary Heebner and gallerist Edward Cella in conversation. This informal tour of the exhibition will offer insights into the artist’s most recent large format collage paintings.
Saturday, November 16th, 2013 | 5 pm
For press inquiries, images, or general questions contact:
Marieke Treilhard / 323.525.0053
marieke@edwardcella.com
Edward Cella Art + Architecture
6018 Wilshire Blvd.,
Los Angeles, CA 90036
