Duane Bousfield: Field of Dreams

NEW YORK, NY – Upsilon Gallery is pleased to announce Field of Dreams, the first major solo show and official New York City debut of American artist Duane Bousfield. The exhibition will offer a retrospective view of the artist's career to-date, featuring a selection of contemporary and historical artworks, including large-scale paintings and intimate works on paper. An opening reception will be held on February 29, 6 - 8pm.

“If you build it, they will come” is central to the artist ideal of working from the heart to create art so personal, it’s universal.

Windows into worlds where dreams can play, we explore surfaces that reach into deep space in a land of rhythmic lines that dance through the air. Seeming to fly through dimensions, foreground and background weave together in a glittering interplay of opalescence and translucency. From textures into pictorial space, we discover new depths of field.

“Like gazing into a crystal, facets of light pave the way through an enchanted realm,” the artist explains. In the poetic world of art, we find places to reflect, imagine, and feel. Intuitive and evocative, titles resonate rather than define. The spirit of a theme is meant to convey basic human issues: hope, fear, searching, striving, love, loss, life, death, God. The artist encourages each viewer’s own personal interpretation, as it releases the inner poet. Abstract art expresses rather than illustrates.

“A good painting is a novel authored primarily by the viewers not the painter.” – Denis Diderot

Feeling the colors and riding the lines through the composition, there is no need to translate the experience into words. Paint techniques become subject matter in their own right through layers of dry-brush, expressive scraping, transparent glazes and energetic brushwork. Layers of clear colors raked atop jewel-tones blend in our eye like a TV screen, each hue singing out its part of the chorus.

The ‘Calligraph’ series of one-line drawings is an elegant shorthand for Bousfield’s abstract figures. Harmonic and lyrical, seeing the line become animated is an exhilarating iteration of New York Abstract Expressionism. We feel the line quality, see the speed of execution, and imagine into the melodic forms. “Follow the line like a roller coaster or see the whole as a figure.” Watching the line weave through itself gives us the feeling of racing through fields of texture effortlessly. As a continuous line, they resemble Labyrinths and are in the tradition of the Japanese calligraphic circle, Ensō, practiced by Zen monks as a meditation.

“A drawing is taking a dot for a walk.” – Paul Klee

At the heart of Bousfield's work lies a lyrical celebration of color and tactile sensations. From geometric landscapes to abstract dreamscapes and calligraphs, these works encourage us to imagine into a world of luminous beauty for a highly personal visceral experience. Join us on a journey through the artistic realm of Duane Bousfield, where the boundaries between imagination and reality blur, and the possibilities are as endless as the human spirit itself.

Bousfield has exhibited with prominent galleries internationally, and his work is included in major collections around the world including the Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York; the Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA; and Apple Computer Inc., among many others.

On the occasion of Duane Bousfield: Field of Dreams, a full color exhibition catalogue will be published in collaboration with the artist. For further information, please contact: info@upsilongallery.com.

Upsilon Gallery is located at 23 East 67th Street, New York, NY 10065. Exhibition hours are Tuesday to Friday 10:00 AM-6:00 PM, Saturday 10AM-5PM & by appointment. Please contact the gallery at (646) 476-4190 or email at info@upsilongallery.com for further details.