Nathalie Karg and the Green Gallery are delighted to present a special one week exhibition of new paintings by the Milwaukee based painter Peter Barrickman. The show takes it’s name, Elwood Arms, from an apartment building in Milwaukee that was home to countless artists, writers, and musicians, and was affectionately nicknamed after its caretaker and most senior tenant.
The show is comprised of eleven acrylic and oil paintings inspired by buildings such as Elwood Arms and their high-ceilinged lobbies. The transient space of a lobby—a place of continual coming and going—becomes a metaphor for the open narrative potential of painting.
In thinking about how a painting simultaneously denies and allows reading, Barrickman’s continual experiments with alternating forms and repeating colors create a transitional visual space in which the public expression of the artist commixes the private experience of the viewer. Put in the artist’s own words, “it is a formal renewal that serves to clarify and awaken the subject.”
