Recent Work
In more recent times I have been developing much smaller pieces both in terms of the fabric based work and in a new series of small oil paintings. The work in both mediums are more playful and more individually conceived with a different form languages being explore between the different works. Less programmatic or series based, at least at this time. Part of this change in mind-set for me relates to my not scheduling exhibitions for the next two year period. The past decade has been so full of exhibitions. I need time to slow down and take stock. Recently I have enjoyed experimenting with new media and imagery, its been an opportunity to shift directions and explore a different terrain.
Fall Collection - Made to Measure
In this latest body of work, Rosser has shifted the focus of his work dramatically, adding a bold new layer to his formal explorations. With his selection of ready-made fabrics as a material he has transformed the nature of his compositional strategies. As he collages together various swatches of cloth, the cultural and historical associations that have seeped into them through design and usage interact with each other in unpredictably quirky, provocative, and sometimes humorous ways. The fabrics’ rich information exchange values have ramped up the opportunistic processes begun through the act of juxtaposition.
2007
Hide and Seek - William Shearburn Gallery St Louis & Jan Weiner Gallery Kansas City
The subtly rhythmic qualities of Rosser’s gray paintings evoke a sense of an encrypted frozen narrative. Akin to an allegorical tapestry, the symbol of the ovoid forms that beautifully pattern his works are left undefined within the complex intertwining field of special folds.
2005
To be continued… - Exhibition South Dakota Art Museum
The last six years have witnessed Warren Rosser’s renaissance as a painter; over this period an impressive and still evolving body of work is the subject of the present survey at the South Dakota Art Museum, and of this essay.
2004
Parade: Parallel Tracks
An exhibition of 32 mono-prints and 32 collaborative poems by H L Hix. At the Baines Wing Gallery, University of Leeds England and the Jan Weiner Gallery Kansas City.
2002
Repeat Offender
For his exhibition at the Forum for Contemporary Art Warren Rosser presents a new body of work entitled Repeat Offender that continues his interest in the dynamics of movement and time/space continuum. This series include large scale abstract acrylic paintings on canvas. Rosser’s new work- in sharp contrast to the encaustic works of the early 1980s, the wooden sculptures of the early 90s and his charcoal drawings of the mid 90s- are visual scores set in motion through a unique process of under painting and the layering of moving images.
2001
Counterpoint Exhibition - Epsten Gallery
Formally related to the “Hybrid View” paintings, Rosser’s next series, exhibited under the title “Counterpoint,” was also designed for a specific space, the Epsten Gallery at Jewish Museum in Overland Park, Kansas. For this venue Rosser created a “painting installation” comprising three horizontal canvases. Two of these, Repeat Offender and Primordial Line, measure seven by sixteen feet, making them the largest paintings Rosser had executed to date. These canvases occupied opposite walls of the roughly cubical gallery, while the third, smaller work, Drawn Out, hung perpendicular to and served as a visual “bridge” between them. Rosser’s intention in orchestrating what he called a “painted environment” was to create a visual gestalt, and to investigate both the optical and physical effects of color surrounding the viewer in an enclosed space. “How do we experience color and color space in front of us and behind us simultaneously?” asked the artist. “How does memory play into the experience of looking at the painting in front of us now, when we just experienced the painting now behind us?”
2001
Hybrid View - The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art
Rosser built a body of work for this exhibition Hybrid View, he envisioned the sequential space of the gallery in his mind and saw the works acting as one piece at time…the paintings and mono-prints playing off each other. An interesting twist appears when you discover that Rosser’s work with the mono-prints influenced the paintings. Typically an artist’s paintings influence the prints. Again Rosser is willing to try something new, to break with tradition and with his past.
2000
AlternateTracking - Bemis Center for Contemporary Art
Like the work of Gerhard Richter, which defines painting as a regime of the surface, Warren Rosser’s recent painting delves into color and abstract form to define surface as a palette of gesture. His indulgently colored, rigorously worked paintings rotate around a central motif that recurs, as an abstract protagonist, through most of the paintings. As an oval shape trailing a tail, or an ellipse that plunges, comet-like, along its painterly path, this motif serves to organize and activate the deep chromatic space of the painting. As one encounters the paintings Rosser has produced throughout the late-1990’s, one must negotiate, even navigate, the permutations of this allusive formal emblem.
2000
Individual Pieces
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Works on Paper & Prints
My prints fall into two categories: the editioned lithographs published and printed by Mike Simms at Lawrence Litho Workshop, and the individual monoprints printed on handmade paper made by Twin-rocker paper makers. The monoprints are more akin to the paintings. I print the monoprints myself.
Kansas City Downtown Airport
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Kansas City Fire Department
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Sulgrave Atrium
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