The Heckscher Museum of Art’s collection spans 500 years with particular emphasis on art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American landscape painting and work by Long Island artists, past and present, are particular strengths, as is American and European modernism.
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Untitled (Pool Table Abstraction)
In a 2009 interview in Art in America, New Orleans native Wayne Gonzales declined to “describe himself as a political artist,” yet affirmed the adage “all art is political.” While this series of assertions is ambiguous, there is no such equivocation in his highly-charged works, which appropriate well-known images to convey his personal vision. Gonzales uses carefully chosen colors (or lack thereof) to seemingly transform and translocate these visual representations to another time and place, challenging their original meaning and purpose. Not surprisingly, his more famous works draw striking comparisons to those of Pop artist Andy Warhol, whose 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was cited as making a “huge impression” on the contemporary painter. Optical art, which focuses on the abstract use of color and shapes to convey emotion, also influenced Gonzales, as seen in Untitled (Pool Table Abstraction). Although ostensibly apolitical in content, this gouache demonstrates Gonzales’ attention to color and the varying psychological responses it can elicit through carefully-planned combinations.