George Dunbar: Retrospective

The Slidell Cultural Center at City Hall is pleased to announce a new retrospective exhibition by Slidell artist George Dunbar. Throughout his groundbreaking, seven-decade long career, Dunbar has continually reinvented his style by exploring unconventional techniques and approaches to materials. In so doing, he has recontextualized his aesthetic vocabulary and ideas that have intrigued him since the early stages of his artistic career. A common thread among these diverse practices is his unique deployment of alluvion, or clay. His compositions often begin with multiple layers of fine German clays, meticulously applied to the picture plane, which Dunbar builds up, gilds, distresses, and excavates, imparting dramatically topographical effects that imbue the paintings with sculptural qualities. In bas-relief as well as more traditionally two-dimensional pieces, the artist’s fluency in gestural, Hard Edge, and neo-Baroque idioms is anchored in a distinctive aesthetic thumbprint uniquely his own. Across his broad spectrum of periods, processes, and materials, George Dunbar balances perfectionist technique with an appreciation for the inspired and random, turning the elements of the earth—clay, pigment, metal, and the human hand that shapes them—into objects of unparalleled sophistication, complexity, and beauty.  

An opening reception will take place on March 19, from 5 pm–9 pm. myslidell.com.