Side Room Gallery is pleased to present Chuck Webster: Cathedrals, an online selection of three paintings and four works on paper by Chuck Webster made between 2015 and 2016.

Initial inspiration for this series came from Picasso’s linocut rinses and his collaboration with Pierre Reverdy, Le Chant des Mortes (1948). Later inspiration includes Terry Winters’s Graphic Primitives and Victor Hugo’s walnut ink wash drawings. Especially evident in this series is Webster’s experimental use of materials. In the works on paper, the majority of the inks and watercolors were hand-made, mulled from specific natural pigments. The walnut ink was crafted specifically for this project from that summer’s crop of nuts, and the papers were produced by the fourth generation Zerkall-Buetten mill in Germany. Webster washed and scraped down the paper repeatedly, lending the ink its characteristic luster and the paper its signature delicacy.

As David Krut has written, this series “is a celebration of the aesthetic experience of a priori forms. These works are built on the concept of the church as a place where the physical and the ephemeral coexist and occasionally collide. Cathedrals considers the materiality of the structure of a church – the stone, glass, and wood – as being as important and integral to its history as the hands that built it and the hands that pray within. Webster’s work is best observed through a play on figure ground relationships – where some marks melt into one another while others exist as thick black lines that either hold the ground or break it apart.”

Chuck Webster was born in Binghamton, NY and received a BA from Oberlin College in 1992 and a MFA from American University in 1996. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including those at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2019 print survey), Planthouse, New York (2021, 2020), Zevitas Marcus, Los Angeles (2021, 2015), Ziehersmith, New York (2012, 2011, 2008, 2006, 2005, 2003), Betty Cuningham, New York (2017, 2013) and Salander O’Reilly (2007). The artist’s work can be seen in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Dallas Museum of Art. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Milton and Sally Michel Avery Visual Arts Fellowship at Yaddo, 2010 and 2000; the NAAF Fellowship at The American Academy in Rome; the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting at The American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the Winter Fellowship at the Fine Art Works Center in Provincetown MA, 2004. Webster lives and works in New York City.

For further information, please contact Gilles Heno-Coe at gilles@sideroomgallery.com. Visit us on Instagram @sideroomgallery.