The New York Academy of Art has announced an exhibition by an award-winning musician, activist and accomplished artist John Mellencamp. The show begins September 29, 2022 and will run until November 15, 2022.
“The art of John Mellencamp extends the American mark of expressionism… Free-spirited, his work strikes us. It is not a work that gropes on the edges; he is just as strong-willed as the best of the American Expressionists, regardless of the period to which we might draw a comparison,” says Dr. Louis A. Zona.
As his musical career flourished, Mellencamp began painting seriously in 1980 with an early affinity for portraiture influenced by the works of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann.
His kinship with early 20th century German Expressionism, existentially focused on the human condition, serves as the foundation for the development of Mellencamp’s “work”.
His large-scale oil portraits and multi-media works document the heart and soul of America, revealing unsettling yet beautiful truths with a kind of anti-establishment frown mixed with a rich sense of storytelling. Like his music, Mellencamp’s paintings are carefully composed through the structural demands of harmony, rhythm, and order, and are thematically in line with the heartfelt, heartfelt small-town voice.
John Mellencamp: American Paintings and Assemblages Coffee Table Art Book will be released on October 18 via Rizzoli New York. This book documents “the heart and soul of America” with an “anti-establishment frown”. The book features 170 original works, essays by David L. Shirley and Bob Guccione Jr, and a foreword written by Dr. Louis A. Zona. Mellencamp’s art is storytelling at its finest.
The exhibition is curated by Dexter Wimberly, an acclaimed American curator based in Japan who has curated exhibitions around the world.
“Mellencamp is a very serious visual artist who has a lot to say about life and the times we live in,” says Wimberly. “I am delighted to have the opportunity to share his work with a new audience of art lovers and collectors.”
“Although we know Mellencamp primarily as a rock star, one of the best sellers of all time and a Hall of Famer, he is also a great painter, as this book shows. Not a musician who also paints… No, John rightfully belongs in the pantheon of modern art,” says Bob Guccione Jr.
Visit the official website of the New York Academy of Arts for more information.
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