Fred Stonehouse

Howard Scott Gallery is pleased to announce the opening – on Thursday, September 10 through Saturday, October 17[2015] – of Fred Stonehouse’s eighth solo exhibition. The works that will compose this exhibition will include paintings and works on paper.

After many years of missing opportunities to travel to Italy, Stonehouse finally visited Milan, Venice and Padua in 2014. Seeing the Giotto frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel made a significant impact on his understanding of the birth of the Renaissance painting. That moment when the tensions between the flatness of Medieval art and the naturalism of what came later represents a sort of “sweet spot” in art history that resonates within his own creative process.

The figures in this new series echo the slightly awkward beaten down, broken, and drained of their humanity, that often appears in Stonehouse works, can also be found lurking about in various masterpieces of early Renaissance art. These characters rarely occupy center stage in this art, but can be found in backgrounds, lunettes and side chapels at every turn in Italy.

These castaway creatures forgotten homunculi are given leading roles in this new series. It’s as if the figures are trapped between the symbolic world of geometric pattern and the physical world of fifteenth Century Italy. Stonehouse is interested in the energy of that time and the atmosphere of how that painting looks to his eyes today.

Fred Stonehouse began exhibiting publicly in 1982. Ten years later, he was honored with his first solo exhibition in a museum, The Madison Art Center (Wisconsin) and the show traveled to the Chicago Cultural Center (catalog essay by Eleanor Heartney). His work has been seen in solo show context with regularity in his native city Milwaukee, and in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York for more than twelve years. In 2010 the exhibition space, Inova, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, mounted an extensive exhibition of his work. That same year he had his first solo exhibition outside the United States, in Puebla, Mexico. Other solo exhibitions have taken place in Berlin, Germany. His most recent solo exhibition was at Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea in Milan, Italy. In September he will participate in HEY, Act III at La Halle Saint Pierre, Paris France and Ephemeral, The Spirit Among Us, at Adelphi University, Garden City, NY.