Exhibition Description
Timothy van Laar
The Loss of Either/Or
Sept 6 – Oct 11, 2014
Re:View Contemporary is pleased to announce our upcoming solo exhibit and opening of our Fall exhibit season: Timothy van Laar’s The Loss of Either/Or. This exciting project is also the introduction of van Laar as the latest addition to Re:View Contemporary’s roster of represented artists.
Van Laar describes the paintings in this exhibition as “rooted in collage and its disruptive procedures. Each painting makes use of multiple languages of paint. Simple, varied paint applications catalog a wide range of painting processes and at the same time become specific images and art historical references—a bird, a smear of black, a bowl, a puddle of transparent paint, a hard-edged grid of colored squares.
Like collage and its radical recontextualizations, these paintings examine the nature of representation and the function of signs. The paintings are unsystematic and eccentric, offering visual puns, arbitrary relationships, playful allusions to art history, personal stories, and surprising shifts of materiality.”
Tim van Laar is a mixed-media artist working in painting, collage, installation, drawing and more, as well as a distinguished scholar and art critic. He’s shown his work both nationally and internationally and is a part of many noteworthy private and public collections, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Illinois State Museum, J.P. Morgan, Herman Miller and Columbus State University.
Tim van Laar is currently Chair of Fine Arts at College for Creative Studies (CCS) in Detroit, and comes from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he taught studio art, criticism and art theory. He also served in various administrative capacities at UIUC, including Chair of Painting and Sculpture, Studio Division Chair, Assistant Director of the School of Art and Design, and Director of Graduate Studies. He additionally coordinated the UIUC international program.
Van Laar has shown his paintings, art installations and works on paper widely in nearly 200 solo and group exhibitions across the United States, Europe and China. He has published some two dozen book chapters, exhibition catalog essays and reviews. He has also co-authored three books that are used in art and design programs across the nation. The most recent, Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2013. He has received numerous awards, grants and honors, including the Pew Charitable Trusts Scholars Grant, Fulbright Fellowship, Yaddo Residency and Arts America Grant.
A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Van Laar has a BA from Calvin College and an MFA from Wayne State University. He has been a visiting artist, panelist and guest lecturer at numerous conferences, colleges, universities and museums in the U.S. and Europe. His work has been featured in many publications, including Who’s Who in American Art, Die Welt (Germany), Chicago Tribune, ARTnews and The Detroit News.