THORNTON WILLIS

Thornton Willis moved into the SoHo neighborhood in the late 60’s and was influenced by the rough edges and graffiti of the industrial cityscape at the time. Of these early experiences, Willis has said that “Wandering around this abandoned neighborhood at night was like going into a cave and reading its history on the walls.” While here during SoHo’s early period, he was also exposed to the work of fellow artists in the neighborhood and emerging fields of artistic inquiry such as Process art, which would have lasting consequences for his practice, as can be seen most prominently in his early Wall series created with a wet-on-wet method using rollers across unstretched canvas laid out on the studio floor.

In 1970, his work was included in the significant travelling exhibition Lyrical Abstraction at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, and was subsequently donated by Larry Aldrich to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Willis gained further attention early on with his Wedge series in the 1970’s and has unabashedly carried on the legacy of the New York School of painting throughout his decades-long career. His distinctive style, which is represented in the permanent collections of numerous major museums, emerges from what the artist himself has recounted as an attempted synthesis of more “lyrical” Abstract Expressionist painters (Willem DeKooning, Jackson Pollock) with the more subdued, cooler formalism of artists like Frank Stella or Barnett Newman. The density and configurations reflected in his recent Steps series are testimony to his continued attention to the urban environment and the changes that have come to mark SoHo.