Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present a selection of paintings by Frederick Wight (1902-1986), painted in the last decade of the artist’s life. The works represent the culmination of an illustrious career spent writing on, exhibiting, and advocating for art and artists as a celebrated educator and art gallery director. Upon his retirement in 1973 from a 20-year directorship of the art gallery at the University of California, Los Angeles, Wight was able to fully devote his twilight years to his own artistic practice.
The tension between the cosmic pull of time and its experience on a human scale is a primary focus of Wight’s painting, embodied in the multiple celestial bodies arcing across his incandescent skies. Their positions in the heavens mark points on an infinite continuum, parceling out digestible increments of hours and days. Meanwhile, the earth below remains indifferent, grinding along on its own imperceptible geologic time scale. With the spectrum between an hour and an eternity compressed into a single image, the fullness of a human lifetime feels simultaneously insignificant and immeasurable.
