WESTERN VISIONS
Paintings & Serigraphs
by
BILLY
SCHENCK

Billy Schenck has been known internationally for over 44 years as one of the originators of the contemporary Western pop art movement. He has had over 100 solo shows and is included in 56 museum collections.

Schenck is an American painter who incorporates techniques from photorealism with a pop art sensibility to both exalt and poke fun at images of the West. This exhibition features a selection of Schenck’s paintings and serigraphs that survey his career.

“What has remained constant throughout Schenck’s career is his individuality in dealing with the subject matter of the West. Using the artistic formula of classic Western film direction and the photographically reliant systems of contemporary art, he has bridged two genres that resonate with the American experience. 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.” - Julie Sasse, Chief Curator and Curator of Modern and Art, Tucson Museum of Art.

Career highlights for the artist include the 2018 retrospective exhibition: Andy Warhol: Cowboy and Indians / Billy Schenck: Myth of the West, at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas.

Museum collections include: the Denver Art Museum, Booth Western Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Smithsonian Institution,Tucson Museum of Art, Briscoe Western Art Museum and others. Private collections include the estate of Malcolm Forbes, Steve Forbes, Chris Evert, Elaine Horwitch, Louis Meisel, Martina Navratilova, Laurance Rockefeller, Sylvester Stallone and the estate of Fritz Scholder. Corporate collections include American Airlines, IBM, Raymond James Financial, Wells Fargo Bank, Hilton Hotels, First Interstate Bank.

This new exhibition which will be available through 2022 features 35 paintings and 20 serigraphs and is organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA..

I had tremendous initial success, which began to fade in a very short few years. Living in New York I learned a huge unwritten rule - avoid narrative content. That is exactly what I had been doing in my work from day one with the "Western" paintings. I also learned it was a rule that could be broken. Francis Bacon and Fritz Scholder became mentors for me, as examples of at least two artists who had giant careers while retaining non-linear narrative content

By the 1980s I became restless doing interpretations of Western film to the exclusion of all else. Now I began to expand on that theme by Including and alluding to social & political commentary, sometimes by suggestion, sometimes cryptically and sometimes contradicting my own earlier suggested views on an issue. So entered a mischievous, ironic, tongue-in-cheek content to the work.

As I was doing this I was also engaged in a constant struggle and hopefully an expansion of my use of color, as well as composition. The use of light and shadow to create believable looking imagery was always foremost in my work.

Over the decades I became aware of another unwritten rule of making art: stay away from political & social commentary, because it can easily date and make the work irrelevant in a short period of time. How do you get around these quagmires? If you can allude to these elements in a more universal and compelling fashion, it's possible to avoid the pitfalls.

The beauty of working within the Western genre is that it has all the qualities of mythology, and metaphor. It has such a huge international mystique and has attained a timeless quality to it - no other genre in the last 200 years can compete.

Even though it is regarded with disdain & contempt by much of the contemporary art world, I feel comfortable creating and expanding the genre, knowing that Western art has the power to reach and be considered by many cultures in the zr= century. It still has infinite possibilities to be explored.

Since I began making photography as an end in itself, as opposed to just being a vehicle for my paintings circa 2002, I found I could create completely new narratives. I love referring to history and historical narratives in some of my imagery. The images become entirely fabricated faux-historic facts, or revisionist history that viewers quite often have no idea what to believe. I love the concept of creating questions, of forcing a point of view to an idea that has not been seen
before. Intrigue!

And lastly, I think it has become evident that there is a strain of humor that runs through my work. That is another unwritten rule in the painting world - humor is a dangerous concept in the work, if your intention is to be taken seriously. I'll take that risk.…….  

Billy Schenck  December 14, 2015