William MacKendree

American-born painter William MacKendree has worked and exhibited throughout Europe since he began his career in 1987. His earliest works are marked by the integration of powerful linear configurations within vast expanses of canvas. These paintings served as the breeding ground for his subsequent elemental sign-like forms and objects. His later work features motifs from the urban environment and the natural world. The vocabulary of signs in MacKendrees emblematic paintings derives from daily life, nature, and individual and collective memory. This first comprehensive survey of his work over more than two decades presents the varied images and pictorial shifts of abstract fundamentals: the desire to render the painting as a psychologically resonant object through gesture and the material properties of the painting process. MacKendrees varied 20th century precedents such as Edward Hopper and Philip Guston contribute to a painterly language informed by a recent post-modern context. MacKendrees work has been shown in over 40 European museums and galleries and he is represented in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Neue Galerie der Stadt (Linz), Musée dArt Contemporain de Toulouse, the City of Paris, La Grande Arche de la Défense and other public institutions. This book includes a principal essay by Alain Mousseigne, director of Les Abattoirs, the museum of contemporary art in Toulouse and a dialogue between the artist and the art journalist Laurie Hurwitz, revealing the artists personal reflections on his themes and working processes.