Various Small Fires is pleased to present the first West Coast solo exhibition in five decades of works by the late American artist Clarence Holbrook Carter (b. Portsmouth, OH, 1904-2000) as part of an ongoing collaboration with WOLFS gallery (Cleveland, OH).
An artist whose oeuvre is as hard to define as the times in which he worked, the solitary and under-recognized Carter has been most notably compared to Surrealist painters such as Kay Sage, Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirico, yet his perpetual fascination with death, nature, and the metaphysical profoundly shaped his transcendental art. More concerned with the mysteries of the unseen, Carter expertly rendered vast, psychological landscapes and inquisitive musings on mortality, the human-animal relationship, and phenomenology across eight decades. From the roaring twenties to just before the dawn of the new millennium, VSF has selected three unique recurring themes for Carter’s first solo exhibition in the Los Angeles gallery: the Over and Above, Transection, and Eschatos series.
Born in Portsmouth, Ohio in 1904, Carter spent the first years of his career capturing scenes of the American Midwest during the Great Depression. Yet moments from this period also foreshadow the otherworldly and spiritual curiosity that would expand his subject matter in the latter half of his life. In The Lady of Shalott (1927), a woman lies across a dark, watery dreamscape, her head encircled by an ethereal orb of light while morning glories unfurl beneath her. This seminal painting, a portrait of death (as symbolized by the flower, which blooms and dies in a single day), is the first of Carter’s representations of transience as well as the floating, glowing orbs that would characterize the artist’s later works.
One of Carter’s earliest deviations from the American Scene was the Over and Above series, rendered in the 1960s and early 1970s.
