Steve Silver: Empirical Horizons

WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC presents Steve Silver: Empirical Horizons, the first solo exhibition at the gallery for the Brooklyn-based artist. Curated by James Cavello, the exhibition includes thirty-four artworks and is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a decade. The exhibition will be on view September 5 – November 2, 2024.

Steve Silver is a Bronx-born painter who has been creating artworks for over 45 years. After studying at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Silver wrote poetry and taught literature at Hofstra University. In 1977, while hitchhiking from Mexico City to Lima, he had an epiphany riding atop a coal truck, a realization that he was going to become a painter. In 1979, Silver moved into a loft on the top floor of a former ammunitions factory in Williamsburg. The 5,000 square foot space has been pivotal in his artistic career, as he continues to create large scale works. Silver often works in series, each time building upon ideas of geometric forms, textural gestures, and experimentation in color to create new ideas in painting.

As a self-taught artist, Silver's rigorous art process stems from his background studying literature, poetry and the boundlessness of the written word. Writers who have influenced the evolution of his artwork include W. B. Yeats, Herman Melville, Wallace Stevens, C. P. Cavafy, Osip Mandelstam, and Tu Fu.

When entering the exhibition, one encounters twelve paintings from Silver’s 2018-21 “Platagrams” series– poetically self-referential, ‘plata-’ Spanish for ‘silver’ and ‘-gram’ from the Greek for ‘letter’ or ‘piece of writing.’ Each juxtaposes facets of his painting practice, combining elements together as one composes a poem, while blurring the boundaries between sculpture and painting. In his recent 2022 “Languages” series, black and white opposing geometric forms offer comparative dialogues through stark contrast. Other works employ interference acrylic, an iridescent or pearlescent pigment that relies on one’s physical perspective and perception of light, as seen in his small-scale 2008 “Atmosphere” paintings, and in the seven-foot high by nine foot wide 2010-11 “Palisades” installation. Silver highlights the variability in the perception of interference acrylic in the 2009 "And The Key is Turned," titled after W.B. Yeats' Meditations in Times of Civil War, in which Yeats writes: "We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty."

While drawing from principles explored by a diverse group of artists including Lita Albuquerque, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Barnett Newman and David Smith, Silver has never strictly adhered to the rigid tenets of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, or Color Field Painting. Although he was recognized and represented in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s by New York art dealer Ivan Karp and had a number of solo shows in Germany, Silver mostly worked without gallery representation and developed his own unique poetic framework for abstract painting.