WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC was pleased to present an exhibition of large-scale paintings from the 1960s by New York artist Will Insley. This exhibition is the first after the artist's death in August 2011. Will Insley worked for 50 years, drawing and painting his concept of an abstract city entitled ONECITY. The paintings on view reflect the artist's initial explorations that led to his monumental project, exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1984, under the title "Opaque Civilization".
Will Insley © Westwood Gallery NYC.
In Claudine Humblet's 2007 book, The New American Abstraction 1950-1970, she observes the following about Will Insley's early large scale paintings in primary colors: "The years 1955-57 were crucial for the course of Insley's career, as he addressed the vital and artistic dilemma at the root of his singular development. The artist's inner needs drove him to diverge philosophically from the functional aims of "practical architecture." In a crucial way, he wanted to approach art "thinking as an architect and yet acting as an artist." (...)The idea of the center haunted Insley's first shaped works just as the symbol of the labyrinth was to do in the first sketches and designs of his dream architecture [and] the universe of fragments opened up between 1961 and 1963 with a multitude of cutout forms, flat shapes with four elements symmetrically arranged around a central opening."
WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC owns and manages the Estate of Will Insley.