Bill Schenck, Two Guys, 1978, serigraph, , AP, edition of 49
Bill Schenck: The Serigraphs
Contemporary painter Bill Schenck has long examined the American West with a cinematographer’s sense of mise-en-scène, a novelist’s attention to literary embellishment, a cultural theorist’s perspective on the realities of modern Western life, and an artist’s eye for dramatic composition, light, and color. His hard-edge oil paintings created over the past four decades have spanned a range of approaches, however little attention has been given to a unique body of serigraphs he created over a twenty-five year span.
Between the early 1970s and the mid-1990s, Schenck created fifty-two editions of serigraphs. They encompass a variety of themes including fictionalized Western histories, Native American subjects, text and image works, and depictions of the modern cowboy/cowgirl. The Technicolor vistas and romanticized cowboys and Indians in Schenck’s serigraphs exhibit a passionate reverence for the cinematic Western. His Photo-realist style lends itself to a contemporary interpretation of the West in a melding of Pop art graphic boldness and Warholian mythmaking.
Using the artistic formulae of classic Western film direction and the photographically reliant systems of contemporary art, he has bridged two genres that resonate with the American experience. Rather than standing as an outside observer to the realities and myths of the West, Schenck is a part of the scene, figuratively and literally. From early depictions of cinematic cowboys to real-life cowboys and cowgirls to poetic reveries about the Native American existence in the Southwest, Schenck melds the real with the imagined, autobiography with fantasy.
Major funding for this exhibition is provided by:
The Stonewall Foundation
Additional support provided by:
Western Art Patrons of the Tucson Museum of Art
M & I Wealth Management
Anne and Edward Lyman
Jana and Robert Knight
Lodge on the Desert
