Castello Nuovo: Still Life with Daylilies and Watermelon

APO-046-OC

Hackett-Freedman Gallery of San Francisco presents a selection of recent still life paintings by James Aponovich. This show is part of the traveling exhibition “James Aponovich: A Retrospective,” organized by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH. A full-color catalogue with essays by the Currier’s Associate Curator Kurt J. Sundstrom and author Howard Mansfield accompanies the exhibition. The show will feature large- and medium-size still life canvases as well as recent, surreally beautiful, landscape paintings.

Aponovich strives to depict the ultimate object in his still life paintings. His fruits, fabrics, flowers, and vessels represent the ideal form—what the artist calls its ‘true essence’ as opposed to its reality. “In my work,” Aponovich says, “if I am painting a peach, it’s not just the soft, furry flesh outside, but the hard pit inside. That’s the kind of meditation on objects that I seek in my approach.”¹

Noted for its geometry, proportion, composition, and light-filled atmosphere, Aponovich’s still lifes reflect the influence not only of Cézanne and Picasso but also of the early Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca and the Flemish still life masters of the 17th century.

An accomplished figure painter and portraitist, Aponovich turned to still life painting in the early 1980s after an intensive study of Chinese landscape painting. According to Aponovich, it was the “attitude toward interpretation and assimilation [that exists in Chinese painting] so that the object and the artist become one”² that inspired his move to still life.

Aponovich’s work is also greatly informed by nature. Married to a professional horticulturist and an accomplished New England gardener himself, Aponovich paints in conjunction with the bloom seasons, sketching first from the live bulbs and resolving the remainder of the painting during the winter.³

James Aponovich has exhibited nationally since the late 1970s. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Arkansas Art Institute, Little Rock; The Currier Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Portland Art Museum, ME, among others. The artist lives in New Hampshire. This is his second solo exhibition at Hackett-Freedman Gallery.

¹ Charles Giuliano, “Beyond the Real to the Unreal,” James Aponovich. (San Francisco: Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 2001).

² Ibid.

³ Howard Mansfield, James Aponovich: A Retrospective. (New Hampshire: Currier Museum of Art, 2005).

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