Jess Paintings and Paste-ups

Press Release: "The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition of works by the celebrated painter and collage artist Jess (Collins), a leading light of the San Francisco art scene from the 1950s until his death in 2004, and one of the most original artists of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition will include a selection of paintings and collages dating from 1952 to 1993. The exhibition is the first in New York since the comprehensive Jess retrospective "A Grand Collage," was presented at the Whitney Museum in 1994, and the first gallery exhibition in New York in over twenty years. The artist is best known for his paste-ups, translations and salvages. His paste-ups are complicated surrealist collages assembled using magazines, photographs, and any other material at hand. The translations, which comprise thirty-two paintings completed over thirty years, borrow images from a range of sources, including scientific illustrations, childhood photographs, and postcards. He used the terms salvages for those works he created on paintings he found at thrift stores, or unfinished canvases of his own. Included in the exhibition will be some of his most significant works, drawn from museums and private collections. Among the works, will be two of Jess's largest, most complex paste-ups The Unentitled Graces, 1978, (Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery), and A Cryogenic Consideration; Or, Sounding One Horn Of The Dilemma (Winter), 1980 (private collection), and five of Jess's translations, all oil on wood or canvas, the largest measuring 28 x 18 inches."