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San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art

November 5 - February 19, 2012

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560 South First Street San Jose, CA 95113
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Dos Mundos Madremanya Series 2 (detail), 2011, Casein and ink on paper, 12.5 x 10 inches, Courtesy of the Artist
Dos Mundos is an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by abstract artist Tim Craighead who has long explored and exploited mark making and recurring symbols and objects in his work. Craighead’s visual vocabulary includes repetition and duplication of marks and shapes. Shells, vessels, scribbles, knots, polygons, DNA fragments and other representational and abstract gestures are repeated from canvas to canvas. The biomorphic and architectural forms that populate Craighead’s mostly autobiographical painted and printed works are reminiscent of the structural works of Frie Otto and Buckminster Fuller who looked at models found in nature to develop the ideas surrounding their work. “When I look at a painting by Tim Craighead, I feel as though I’ve just awakened from a dream, the details of which are rapidly dissipating and what’s left is fragmented residue that continues to swirl around in my head, ” says Cathy Kimball, the ICA’s Executive Director. Craighead’s’ work inhabits that precise space between the objective and the nonobjective world. His paintings and prints are a unique mix of abstraction and acute attention to representational detail. And it is this dichotomy and tension that drives his work. He is interested in the physicality of paint and its expressive potential. He finds the language of paint to be encyclopedic. He pushes, pulls, wipes, scrapes and smears paint on canvas, often revealing his process of editing and refining. Through his work, Craighead provides an entry to a compelling and provocative space that blurs the distinction between the content and the composition, the recognizable and the mysterious. Craighead lectures in the Art Departments at the University of California Santa Cruz and Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA. He has a B.A. in Printmaking and Sculpture from the University of California Santa Cruz and an M.F.A. in Painting from Columbia University, New York where he was also a Post Graduate Fellow in Painting in 1992-93. Craighead has exhibited his work since the late 1980s with solo exhibits at the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, NM; Smith Andersen Editions, Palo Alto, CA; and the University of California in Santa Cruz. Craighead’s group shows include Lost and Found at Savage Gallery, Portland, OR, Yuma Symposium at the Yuma Fine Arts Museum, AZ; Roll the Dice at Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA, Seven, Painting and Sculpture, with The Heritage Fine Arts Collaborative at the Heritage Bank of Commerce, San Jose, CA; and Small Matters at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. Craighead was recently awarded the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship for 2010-2011. In 2004 he was a lecturer at the Visiting Art Lecture Series at California State University in San Jose, CA, and his Suites of Monotypes have been produced by Taller de Gravat Torralba, Girona, Spain and Smith Andersen Editions, Palo Alto, CA. Craighead's work can be found in collections at the DeSassiet Museum, University of Santa Clara, Santa Clara, CA; the Graham Gund Collection, Boston, MA; and in private collections in Shanghai, China and throughout the United States.