August 27 –- October 15, 2006 Preview Reception: Saturday, August 26, 5-7 p.m.
$8, complimentary to OMA members
W. Hasse Wojtyla (photo by Michael C Gross)
W. Haase Wojtyla:
A Coincidence of Paintings is the first solo museum
exhibition in San Diego County to feature the work of W. Haase Wojtyla.
Born in Chicago in 1933, Wojtyla has lived in San Diego since 1973.
While his art studies began at the Art Institute of Chicago, it
is while living in Southern California that Wojtyla developed his
mature artistic style. As many writers have suggested, Wojtyla’s
style has much in common with the work of British artist Francis
Bacon (1909-1992). Their abstracted forms appear born of the
same experience, and their paintings share a sense of tension that
becomes the catalyst for the viewer’s response.
Three of Wojtyla’s most important series of paintings from
the past thirty years, Nudes in the Shower, Crime Scenes,
and Stalkers, share a similar response and form the foundation
for this retrospective exhibition. While San Diego is familiar
with Wojtyla’s work, it has been almost ten years since a
large-scale exhibition has been presented in the region. The
exhibition includes work from the 1950s and 1970s as well as recent
work that has never been shown.
Tony Mancini in a Terrible Funk Put Violet Saunders into a Trunk
1981
Catherine Gleason, OMA’s Director of Exhibitions
and Collections and the curator of the exhibition, has written an
essay for the catalog, the first publication devoted entirely to
the work of W. Haase Wojtyla. In addition to several reproductions
of Wojtyla’'s paintings, the catalog will include the artist’s
complete exhibition history. Gleason’s essay, Demented
Dreams: The Work of W. Haase Wojtyla, will analyze the artist’s
use of grotesque imagery by examining a history of the grotesque
in art. While the inclusion of grotesque elements in Western
art has its roots in antiquity, its influence extends through the
modernist period and into the twenty-first century. The depth
of Wojtyla’s creative impulse is apparent when placing the
artist’s work within a lineage that includes Hieronymus Bosch,
Francisco de Goya, and Francis Bacon.
