Groveland Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Northfield, Minnesota artist, Wendell Arneson. Arneson was a professor of fine art at St. Olaf College for 37 years, until his retirement in 2015. He has exhibited his work throughout the region for over 40 years. His paintings are part of numerous collections including Ford Motor Company, Prudential Life Insurance, 3M Corporation, US Bank, General Motors Corporation, Princeton University and the Hillstrom Museum of Art.

Arneson’s work is exciting and intelligent, giving reference to landscape, deconstructed and reassembled into planes of warm and cool color. Working in both large and small scale, these expressionist paintings have a surface of fluid brushwork and movement. Of his work, Arneson writes:

“The work of this exhibit draws from an inventory of images that make multiple, varied references that allow for content to shuffle, reinvent, and remake itself. As an image maker, I seek the intersection between figuration and abstraction. Art, for me, does not provide answers but rather provokes questions and seeks possibilities.

This exhibition of abstract paintings and mixed media drawings honor mapping as a conceptual base as well as references to time, place, and memory. The images may reflect specific locations while also seeking, through abstraction, multiple layers of entrance and ambiguity for the viewer. The images in both the paintings and the mixed-media drawings are imaginatively less certain and provide a visual journey of transformation. What matters most is a painterly dialogue between image, structure, color, tactile surface, and space. The result evokes a journey of discovery and imagination.”