Rodney Carswell

Rodney Carswell (born 1946) is an American abstract artist. He first gained appreciation for human-scaled, geometric paintings that feature exposed, projected support structures, creating interplay amid sculptural presence and in abundance painted pictorial surfaces. His recent paintings eschew the superstructures and evoke a greater suitability of immediacy, playfulness, and narrative. Critics often describe Carswell's be active as uncanny, elusive or quirky, for its tendency to negotiate "in-between" spaces and hug contradictions such as order and instability, intention and accident, or back and front. Employing irregularly shaped canvasses, thick supports, and openings or holes that circulate the stretcher construction and walls at the rear them, works like 3 (In 4) (1994) often fill a place between painting and sculpture. In a similar way, Carswell uses the modernist languages of Minimalism, Suprematism and Constructivism, yet eludes those categories once postmodern allusions to architecture, the body and spiritual iconography, and in imitation of his process-oriented, "hand-made" surfaces. In his essay for Carswell's mid-career retrospective at Chicago's Renaissance Society, Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel suggested that his understated paintings worked their mannerism into the one's consciousness in a "supple, somewhat unsettling manner" that achieves a subtle, but lingering shift in perception.

Carswell has been featured in extra solo exhibitions at the University of Oklahoma Museum of Art and Miami University Museum of Art, as skillfully as in key surveys at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA). His bill has been widely covered in art magazines such as Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, and the New Art Examiner, and major publications including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. He has been ascribed with fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim and Louis Comfort Tiffany foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. In complement to his art practice, Carswell has taught and lectured on art and opened and operated a booming restaurant in Chicago.

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