Neil Raitt
Tangerine Sunset
Works
Rocky Glacier (Cloudy Spring)
2022
Oil on canvas
200 × 140 cm
Twin Peaks (Tangerine Repeat)
2022
Oil on canvas
180 × 120 cm
Sunset Rock (Repeat)
2022
Oil on canvas
200 × 140 cm
Deep Forest Falls (Obscurer)
2022
Oil and acrylic on canvas
162 × 100 cm
Monument Valley
2022
Oil and acrylic on canvas
180 × 120 cm
Twin Peaks (Tangerine Sunset)
2022
Oil on canvas
100 × 70 cm
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Crescent Moon (Cayambe Repeat)
2022
Oil on canvas
121.5 × 91 cm
Rocky Glacier (View Through the Trees)
2022
Oil on canvas
200 × 140 cm
Monument Valley (Oval)
2022
Oil on canvas
200 × 140 cm
Neon Nights
2022
Oil on canvas
50 × 40 cm
Deep Forest Falls (The Cave)
2022
Oil and acrylic on canvas
100 × 70 cm
Magenta Moonlight
2022
Watercolor and acrylic on paper
42 × 29 cm
Yucca Valley (Haze)
2022
Watercolor and acrylic on paper
42 × 29 cm
Tropical Alpine
2022
Watercolor and acrylic on paper
42 × 29 cm
Forest Clearing
2022
Watercolor and acrylic on paper
42 × 29 cm
Ochre Stream
2022
Watercolor and acrylic on paper
42 × 29 cm
About
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Truth be told, Neil Raitt has been fantasizing about by the land of unlimited opportunities and boundless landscapes since his youth. He is equally fascinated by the wide range of artistic traditions within the relatively short cultural history of the U.S., where even Sunday painting or supposedly “naïve” art command consideration. In view of these affinities, it is not surprising that Bob Ross, the maker of the legendary TV series The Joy of Painting, became the young painter’s hero. Around about the time Raitt finished his studies, Ross’ palette of American landscapes – from the palm-studded beaches on the Pacific Coast, to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the East – starts to feature in his own works. He adopts Ross’s color schemes and style, and even his famous “happy accidents.” But he doesn’t stop at citing this mélange of patriotism, nostalgia, and kitsch. With the paintings on display, all of which were created this year, he transposes the well-known into the strange. He repeats and changes motifs and combines mutually exclusive images. Surprisingly, this creates patterns and labyrinths that are right on the pulse of the digital age. Raitt’s pleasurable repetitions are neither artificial nor lifeless. On the contrary, his compositions are wonderfully painterly, at times downright impasto. Through this “give one’s all” painting and the refraction and disintegration of the motifs, several major questions arise. Such as that of the thin line between art and kitsch. Raitt himself explained to curator Mark Gisbourne, “I like to get things as close to kitsch as possible, yet not quite crossing the line, but playing with it.” This play with our expectations in this regard, as well as the contrast between “wild” nature and civilization, results in a tense examination of Romanticism and our, often very misleading, ideas about this artistic-philosophical phenomenon. In his essay for the catalog that accompanies our exhibition, Mark Gisbourne has addressed this tension – and appropriately described Raitt’s approach as “romantic irony.”
Neil Raitt was born in Leicester in 1986. He studied art at Norwich University College of the Arts and then painting at the Royal College of Art in London. Since then, Raitt has lived and worked in London. In 2014, the Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas hosted his first major solo exhibition. Subsequently, his work has been featured in a number of international solo and group exhibitions, including the Halle des bouchers in Vienne, the Villa Du Parc centre d’art contemporain in Annemasse, and the DePaul University Art Museum in Chicago. Works by Raitt have found a home in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, among others.
Catalogue
Tangerine Sunset
Edited by Juerg Judin and Pay Matthis Karstens
Text by Mark Gisbourne
In English
295 × 240 mm
64 pages, hardcover
34 color ill.
Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne 2022
ISBN: 978-3-7533-0364-2