Tom Uttech: Into the Woods
On View: October 12, 2019–January 12, 2020
Note new date! Opening Party: Saturday, October 12 | 2:00–5:00
Wisconsin native Tom Uttech is recognized as one of the leading
landscape painters working today in the United States. Often categorized
as a Magic Realist, his paintings weave together a mystical world of
both imagined and real elements. Uttech’s paintings are easily
identifiable by their complex devotion to nature, one that is equally
raw and wild and familiar and inviting. His inspiration derives from
decades of travel to Northern Minnesota and the Quetico Provincial Park
in Ontario, Canada. Uttech’s world is one of waterways, shorelines, and
tumbling rocks precariously perched within thickets of growth.
Over the last decade, Uttech’s enchanted forests have become home and
stage to animal migration, a natural phenomenon rooted in eons of animal
behavior and evolution. Part fantasy, part natural science, these
migration paintings are compelling not only for their settings but for
the hundreds of species of animals flying, swarming, and bolting across
his paintings on a timeless mission and in a perpetual state of
reenactment. Uttech does not identify as an environmental artist, but
his treatment of the migration subject has become synonymous with
encroaching dangers that finds resonance in contemporary issues of
wildlife preservation. Uttech is in many ways most comfortable in the
north woods or the forests that surround his forty-acre farm in
Saukville, Wisconsin, which is also home to his converted barn-studio.
Into the Woods is the artist’s first full-career retrospective
that will include never before seen early paintings and drawings as well as
number of his large-scale migration series paintings from the last
decade. In anticipation of the exhibition, MOWA commissioned Nin Gassinsibingwe,
the most recent and in many ways most spectacular painting in his
ongoing migration series. The Ojibwe title translates as: “I Wipe My
Tears.” The exhibition is accompanied by a major gift of almost two
hundred photographs that was made possible by the artist and the Kohler
Foundation, Inc. The exhibition is curated by Executive Director Laurie
Winters.