Art Department Faculty Quadrennial Exhibition 2016 January 2016

Fred Stonehouse Associate Professor UW–Madison Department of Art, since 2008 Painting and Drawing 1982 Bachelor of Fine Arts, UW–Milwaukee Recent achievements 2015 Man, Myth, Monster & Devils and the Dead, solo show, Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Culver City, CA 2015 The Occasional Mistake, solo show, CG2 Gallery, Nashville, TN 2015 Family Lexicon, solo show, Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy 2015 Not Man The Less, But Nature More, group show, Summerhall, Edinburgh, Scotland 2015 HEY! modern art & pop culture/Act III, group show, Halle SaintPierre, Paris 2015 La famosa invasione degli artisti a Milano, group show, Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy Artist’s statement Ghosts of Padua After many years of missing opportunities to travel to Italy, I finally visited Milan, Venice and Padua. Seeing the Giotto frescos at the Scrovegni Chapel in person made a significant impact on my understanding of the birth of Renaissance painting. That moment, when the tensions between the flatness of medieval art and the naturalism of what came later, represents a sort of “sweet spot” in art history that resonates within my own creative process. The figures in this new series echo the slightly awkward stiffness of the demons, saints and sinners lurking about the various masterpieces of early renaissance art. These characters rarely occupy center stage in this art, but they can be found in backgrounds, lunettes and side chapels at every turn. These castaway creatures, these forgotten homunculi are given the leading roles in this new series. The spaces that they occupy in my work are influenced by the shallow settings and mosaic patterns used to describe the world of much of the church painting that I observed on this trip. It is as if the figures are trapped between the symbolic world of geometric pattern and the physical world of fifteenth-century Italy. The palette of faded pigment and decaying plaster so evident everywhere I went in Italy has left its mark on this work as well and while I am not, in any way, trying to replicate the “antique,” I am interested in the energy of that time and of the atmosphere of how that painting looks to my eyes today. 58 Quadrennial 2016 | Faculty Work in the show Fred Stonehouse (American, b. 1960) Untitled, 2013–2016 Wooden cutouts and drawings Dimensions variable

Art Department Faculty Quadrennial Exhibition 2016 January 2016 | Page 74