Bill Lynch: Drawings & Paintings

About

The Approach is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of drawings and paintings by the late American painter Bill Lynch. Following a much-admired solo presentation by The Approach at Frieze New York in the Spring of 2017 and the publication of the artist’s first monograph together with Ridinghouse and White Columns, this will be the second exhibition of this refreshing oeuvre at the gallery.

Bill Lynch, 1960-2013, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and grew up in New Jersey. He studied art at Cooper Union together with his friend, painter Verne Dawson, who also helped organise the first formal solo exhibition of his work at White Columns, New York, in 2014 after the artist’s untimely death. Lynch immersed himself in making drawings and paintings for over three decades, living in New York, California, and finally North Carolina.

Painting onto pieces of salvaged scrap wood (sometimes on both sides), Lynch depicted birds, animals, blossoming branches, waterfalls, Chinese vases, statuettes and landscapes. The artist’s loaded, seemingly spontaneous brushstrokes betray his investment in Chinese and Japanese painting but also evoke his American roots. His gestures combine a dry lambent brush and thick pasty paint, which confidently flows as Lynch is evidently caught up in the passion of depicting his visions. The moiré woodgrain on the rough boards are often absorbed into his compositions, becoming a still body of water or suggesting a moving sky. Knots and grain in the wood seem to inspire the superimposition of moons, mushrooms, flowers or vessels.

Lynch excelled not only at painting, but also in drawings that will be presented alongside each other in this exhibition at The Approach. Small studies in Conté pencil on paper of nesting and flying birds, a pair of hands at a piano, trees and wildflowers emphasise the great tenderness and sensitivity with which Lynch treated his beloved subject matter.

Exhibitions to date include: White Columns, New York, 2014; The Approach, London, 2015; Tanya Leighton, Berlin, 2015; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2016, The Approach solo booth presentation, Frieze New York, 2017.