Walter Wickiser Gallery


375 South End Ave. 6M
New York 10280 New York
United States
Phone: (212) 945-0711
Email : wwickiserg@aol.com
URL : www.walterwickisergallery.com

Walter Wickiser

Sabrina Sakai

Inah Choi


About

The Walter Wickiser Gallery was established in 1992 in Soho, New York. As the son of American artist and art educator Ralph Wickiser - who was the former Chairman of the graduate Fine Art program at Pratt Institute from 1962-1978 - Walter Wickiser was born and raised in the American art world amongst internationally renowned modern artists including Barnett Newman,Phillip Guston, Jacob Lawrence, George McNeil, Stephen Pace and Phillip Pearlstein. Friendship, at a very early age, with the Milton Avery and Yasuo Kuniyoshi families provided a special mentoring and education which proved very beneficial to his career as an art dealer.

Wickiser's career as an art dealer formally began in 1990 in Soho, NY, when he became the first director of the first gallery to be established in the United States from mainland China. This led to establishing his primary direction as a gallery director to exhibit work by American and Asian-American painters, as well as artists from China, Japan and Korea. It has always been the focus of the Wickiser Gallery to create a visual dialogue between various cultures, and simultaneously reminds us of the ability of art to transcend cultural boundaries. Today the focus has shifted to midrange and Post War international artists.

Since 1993 Wickiser Gallery has worked with the United State State Department and Art for Embassy's Program. Wickiser's artist’s have exhibited in United States Embassy's in Seoul, Korea, Moscow ,Manila, Philippines Qatar, Bucharest, Romania and Cypress, to name a few. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations invited Wickiser to the White House for Art for Embassy's events.

Since 2003 The Wickiser has exhibited at dozens of International Art Fairs including Art Aspen, Art Busan, Art Hamptons,Art Miami , Art on Paper Art Toronto, Houston Fine Art Fair ,LA Art Show, and the Seattle Art Fair to name a few.

Clients and visitors to the gallery have included Will Barnett, Leo Castelli, Michael Douglas, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Phillip Pearlstein, Sally Avery, Sarah Kuniyoshi, Ted Koppel, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Sam Lefrak and Paul Volker.

The Wickiser Gallery has received numerous reviews in Artnews, Art In America , Art and Antiques ,the Washington Post ,Tampa Bay Times and many other internationally recognized publications. The Wickiser has had many online reviews in publications such as the. Huffington Post. Work by many of the Wickiser’s artists have been exhibited at American museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the New Britain Museum of American Art.

Soile Yli-Mäyry Burning Heart

Herman Alfred Sigg The Course of the Rivers II

About the Artist

Soile Yli-Mäyry is a Finnish artist with an impressive international CV. Immensely energetic, she has had more than 250 exhibitions worldwide. Her work reflects this energy. Made with a palette-knife, it is physically bold, one might almost say impatient, in its handling of the artist’s material.
Hermann Alfred Sigg was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1924. After studying at the School of Applied Art, Zurich with, among others, former Bauhaus master and color theorist Johannes Itten, Sigg, like many art students before and after World War II, went to Paris, where he attended the Acade'mie Andre' Lhorte in 1947. Lhote (1885 - 1962), a member of the Cubist circle early in the century, was a noted writer on art and teacher during the 1940s and 50s. In Paris, Sigg became enamored with French art and culture, and admired the Post-Impressionists, especially Bonnard. While the influence of Bonnard was most apparent in Sigg's figurative paintings of the 1950s, the palette and color fields in his later abstract landscapes still occasionally evoke Bonnard's work. Sigg's development of aerial landscape imagery began in 1968 with travel to Southeast Asia as an "artist in residence in the sky" for Swissair, which had previously purchased several of his paintings. From the singular vantage point of the cockpit, Sigg made sketches from which he developed the abstractions of terraced fields and rivers characteristic of his work from the 1970's. On the ground, the artist visited temple sites such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia and made drawings of the sculpture; he also became a passionate collector of Southeast Asia and Khmer sculpture. As a result of his travels, which also included India and Thailand, Sigg began to explore interior architectural space as well as the infinite space of the aerial landscape in his new paintings. Other study trips to Italy, Greece, the Middle East, Nepal, China, and to Guatemala, Mexico and the American West provided inspiration. Since his Southeast Asia trip, the river has become increasingly abstract and distilled, like shorthand or calligraphy. For Sigg, the river is a "mysterious force" with a spirit of its own. In this series, the river becomes a metaphor for passage through life and the human search for the inner self and enlightenment. In articulating his river imagery, the artist discovered Hermann Hesse's novel Siddhartha which became an important influence. Throughout the novel. Siddhartha encounters the river as a changing yet constant, regenerating force, something to listen to and learn from, like life itself.

*Excerpted from The Art of H.A. Sigg by Robert M . Murdock