After the War

Thomas Dane Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by American artist Jimmy Wright (b. 1944, Union City TN). Titled _After the War_, the exhibition will feature Wright's flower paintings and works on paper, made from 1992 onwards. Jimmy Wright has lived and worked in New York since the early 1970s. After growing up in rural Kentucky, Wright moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute of Chicago where he became close friends with members of The False Image group, including Philip Hanson, Christina Ramberg and Roger Brown. In 1974 he moved to New York where he started documenting the flourishing queer landscape of gay bathhouses and bars throughout Manhattan; this post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS epidemic moment is captured in works like _Max's Kansas City_ (1974) and drawings of scenes at Club 82 and the Anvil. With the diagnosis of his partner, Ken Nuzzo, with AIDS in 1988, Wright began working exclusively on paintings of flowers, in a series of emotionally charged works, highly textured in heavily impastoed oil, titled _Flowers for Ken_. This became a favourite subject matter for the rest of his career and the works in _After the War_ can be seen as portraits of the artistic community lost to the pandemic.