March 31st-April 15th, 2018
Opening reception: Saturday, March 31st, 7-10 p.m.

Neutra Institute Museum and Gallery
2379 Glendale Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90039
www.glennwaggnerartist.com

Show 5: Glenn Wagnner solo show

Psychic states emerge in L.A. artist Glenn Waggner’s paintings at Neutra Institute Museum and Gallery

(Los Angeles, CA) – The Neutra Museum Gallery is pleased to present a solo painting exhibit with L.A. artist Glenn Waggner. The artist capitalizes on painting’s formal language to animate his psychologically-charged scenarios. Minimalistic, Waggner’s paintings optimize the use of color as light that is activated between foreground and background, or between the subject and its liminal surroundings.

The artist’s surprising formal invention is a product of mapping spaces. Their overarching geometries are suspended between abstraction and representation, and anchored by figures, architecture, landscape, and other recognizable imagery. Waggner credits this to his process of allowing spontaneous gestures to inform the construction of pictorial space and stimulate new formal and narrative relationships. The artist’s anecdotal titles further contextualize the ambiguous relationships posed. Waggner states, “I ask the viewer to determine their own narrative. Maybe it starts a dialog. The title answers the question or suggests a direction.”

Waggner’s work engages numerous nineteenth and twentieth-century painters in the renewed exploration of formal language to articulate human drama and the unconscious. Among those are the paintings of Edward Hopper and Philip Guston.

Waggner was born and raised in Southern California. Growing up in the beach communities, he was immersed in the 1970’s surfing and skateboarding culture. Always drawing and sketching, Glenn has worked in the architectural profession for many years.
In the year 2000, Waggner discovered oil painting, taking to its qualities of being a freer and looser medium. It was the perfect fit that allowed art to be made using vivid color and no precise lines. It was “plein air” that helped to capture subject matter quickly and avoided precise detailing, like that required in architecture.

Glenn Waggner’s work won 3rd place in ART + SCIENCE’s 2008 juried show, and was featured in Artscene magazine. Waggner has art is in several private collections.