Tom Uttech Opening & Artist Talk, Saturday, December 6

TORY FOLLIARD GALLERY is pleased to announce TOM UTTECH: The Spirit of the Forest, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings. The Spirit of the Forest is Uttech’s ninth solo at Tory Folliard Gallery since his first exhibition in 1990. thirty of the artist’s landscape paintings will be on view. Also included are two highly detailed drawings to give insight into the artist’s working process. A fully illustrated catalog will accompany the exhibition with a foreword by Laurie Winters and an essay by Robert Cozzolino.

Uttech’s work is inspired by his frequent trips to the Boundary Waters between northern Minnesota and Canada and what he calls his “spiritual home,” the Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. Uttech’s lifelong passions for environmental conservation, bird watching, hiking, and spending solitary time in the forest are unified in his sublime paintings. Mythic, atmospheric, and astoundingly detailed, the paintings suggest the infinite beauty and wonder the natural world holds. Out of respect for the native cultures who originally lived, hunted and canoed these isolated wild places, each painting has a title in the Ojibwe language. Filled with intense foliage and wildlife, Uttech’s paintings suggest neither past, present or future, but all time.

A sense of magnificent mystery abounds, and Uttech magically captures this phenomena with his brush. In the artist’s own words: “These paintings are all recollections of the magic I have found in the North Woods. They never depict any actual place. They hope to recreate the feelings those places generate in ourselves … I do also mean to be saying something about the richness and diversity of life on this planet and how magically wonderful this all is by packing so many individuals and species into the same place at the same time.”

A recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award, Uttech’s work is in numerous museum collections, including the Milwaukee Art Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; Honolulu Museum of Art; Tucson Museum of Art; Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend, WI; Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and New Orleans Museum of Art.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. It has not been verified for its accuracy or completeness.