HELENA CELDRN Reality Returns as a Dream is the first exhibition of George Tooker (1920-2011) after his death in March. He portrayed the oppression and the dehumanizing side of progress, which contrasted to scenes of hope and goodness. He painted only 170 pictures. The show is a chance to see a work largely disseminated by private collections. Scenarios of modern angst: lathes and halls of metro that look like prisons, people queuing at ticket offices with officials who look with suspicion by the window, men deeply sleeping in a waiting room George Tooker (1920-2011) was a spiritual painter, is enveloped in a silence which perhaps destined not to be known. In addition, his career boils down to 170 paintings, many of them in private collections and, therefore, difficult to see.
The DC Moore Gallery, New York ACE exposes Reality Returns to Dream (reality becomes converted in dream), the first posthumous exhibition of the work of New York artist, who died in March this year. (Source: Keith Oringer). He painted thinking in the human condition and all its production is the result of personal reflections. His paintings show the dark side of progress, the alienation and the aspects that dehumanize the individual in a society increasingly more demanding and less comprehensive. Despite everything he was a lover of the human being and even if darkness were frequent, also there was room in his work for the hug and the happiness of a night to el raso. Office cubicles populated faces of despair exposure, a chance to contemplate a work so dispersed and hidden, is a tribute to the enigmatic imagery and technique luminous Tooker, which since it began in the 1940s used for all their work the egg tempera, a method of Renaissance inspiration for classical sensitivity figures, but in nothing harmonics scenarios. Office cubicles of faces of despair, human beings walking in pajamas between numbered and stacked cubes Tooker populated chased small essential truths with details and subtle gestures. In addition to universal and general symbolism, images situations had to do with the era in which he lived. Many of its scenes express the uncertainty of the cold war.
He also addressed the oppression and racial conflicts that led him to become involved in the Civil Rights Movement (movement for civil rights). He tried to portray the world with such force, that ideas for his paintings were visiting him while he slept and were a reality tinged with oneiric elements: looking for printed reality in mind. Looking for with such intensity that it comes back to me in dreams, but are not dreams or fantasy that portrait. Source of the news: posthumous exhibition for the painter who played with absurdity and magic of reality