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West Bend Exhibition

Tom Uttech

From the Permanent Collection

May 2–September 6

MOWA | West Bend

About the Exhibition

Tom Uttech’s landscapes weave together a mystical world inhabited by both imagined and real elements

Tom Uttech’s landscapes weave together a mystical world inhabited by both imagined and real elements that are loosely based on his beloved North Woods. This summer, in tandem with The American Landscape exhibition, MOWA will present a special installation of Uttech’s paintings from the permanent collection that have not been on view since the museum’s major retrospective of 2019.

The installation showcases work from four distinct phases of Uttech’s distinguished sixty-year career, including rare early paintings such as Painting for Buckingham Lake (1973), in which he alludes to the cosmic origins and primeval character of Boundary Waters, a protected wilderness park of several million acres on the US–Canadian border between Ontario and Minnesota. Rock (1983), depicting an enormous lichen-covered boulder that looks as if it found its resting place millennia ago, marked a turning point in Uttech’s thinking and career. In this painting, he allowed the visual power of a singular dominant form to replace the mythic creatures he had used previously to suggest the spiritual essence of nature. Uttech discovered that nature’s aura could be expressed through a robust, particularized landscape. Today, more than four decades later, Uttech views Rock as his most important painting.

This exceptional installation will give visitors the opportunity to consider the evolution of Uttech’s career in conjunction with The American Landscape exhibition opening in early May.

Tom Uttech, Painting for Buckingham Lake, 1973 (left)