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Russ Warren
Russ Warren (American, b. 1951) is a contemporary figurative painter who has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad, notably in the 1981 Whitney Biennial and the 1984 Venice Biennale. A painter in the Neo-Expressionist style, he has drawn inspiration from Spanish masters, such as Velazquez, Goya and Picasso, as well as from Mexican folk art and southwestern subjects. He was committed to his own Regionalist style during his formative years spent in Texas and New Mexico, and was picked up by Phyllis Kind in 1981. After this his art became more "magical realist", relying on symbol, allegory, and unusual shifts in scale. His paintings and prints feature flat figures, jagged shadows, and semi-autobiographical content. His oil paintings layer paint, often incorporate collage, and usually contain either figures or horses, juxtaposed in strange tableaux.

Education and Professional Career
Born in 1951, in Washington, DC, Warren began his studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston in 1969. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Mexico in 1973 and his MFA in 1977 from the University of Texas San Antonio. During these formative years, he developed his own brand of Regionalism, quoting subjects and styles from his native Texas and from Southwestern and Mexican Folk Art. As part of his M.F.A. degree, he also wrote a Masters Thesis on Contemporary Regionalism, aligning his own art with that style which had its roots in American painters of the 30s such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton and continued on through the Chicago School which included artists such as Jim Nutt, Roger Brown and Ed Paschke. It also maintained that to be a major contemporary artist, one did not have to follow the latest styles in New York. And his career seemed to prove this, although it landed him squarely in this New York milieu when Phyllis Kind with galleries in Chicago and New York picked him up. Before that, his painting Texas Pride (1974–75) was chosen by juror Marcia Tucker, the Curator for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York for “Best of Show,” at the New Orleans Museum of Art Triennial in 1980. Tom Armstrong, then Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, discovered Warren's work while juror for an exhibition in Florida, and he was subsequently asked to participate in the 1981 Whitney Biennial. In 1984, his work was also included in the Venice Biennale, and was included in the U.S. Pavilion Exhibition, Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained curated by Marcia Tucker. Throughout the 1980s Warren showed with Phyllis Kind in Chicago and New York and was included in countless exhibitions which highlighted "New Figurative" painting, "Neo-Expressionism" and "the New Southern Art." He taught painting and printmaking as Professor of Art at Davidson College from 1978 - 2008. . He has continued to exhibit widely in museums and gelleries represented both by the Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York and Chicago, by Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, NC, and by Les Yeux du Monde in Charlottesville, VA among others.

Style
Warren’s early work, which dates from 1969–1973, reveals a dedicated study of the modernists, including Cezanne, Kirchner, Matisse, and especially Picasso. He was also interested in developing his own symbols-- Elizabeth Hess of the Village Voice noted in her review, “X-Ray Visions" that his works included “private autobiographical paintings that create a mystique of self.”  While working in Albuquerque and San Antonio in undergraduate and graduate schools, Warren was formulating his own brand of Regionalism, influenced by folk art from Mexico and subjects from his native Texas.  From 1973 until 1979, Warren continued to study in Texas, under his mentor from St. Thomas, Earl Staley, where he continued to work on large paper mache sculptures.  In graduate school, he completed an in depth thesis on regionalism, beginning in the Federal Art Project works of the 1920s and 1930s,focusing on art by Thomas Hart Benton and moving through to the Chicago and Texas movements of the 1970s.  Many of these works featured themes and images specific to Texas and the southwest. He defends his own dedication to painting subjects of his own time and area, as well as repudiating the often heard belief that the best contemporary artists practice in a vaccuum in New York, for example. Many of Warren's regionalist works were shown in the very early site specific installation in Beaumont, Texas, with Earl Staley. Warren's contributions included huge, oversized paper mache Stuckey's ash-trays, Texas Businessmen, oil cans, and Texas Longhorns.

From 1979-1990 his work took another turn, as he moved first to Florida and then to Davidson, NC. Work in this period has been termed by Warren himself as “funky figurative”, but which others, such as art critic Donald Kuspit have termed “madcap surrealist”. His animals and strange geometric figures take part in epic passion plays, hovering on the brink of catastrophe. Many of these situations are semi-autobiographical. Phyllis Kind, his New York art dealer states: "I feel that Russ could be labeled with the new figurative neo-expressionist movement, but in my mind his work stands apart and has a much more clear-cut personal vision." After 1990, Warren continued to explore autobiographically, especially his love of Paso Fino horses. This period featured a series entitled "Mare: A Work in Progress", which consisted of twenty oil paintings measuring 4 x 7’ or 4 x 8’, and filled with the enormous silhouette of a horse, filled with images and serving as a metaphor for life and death, light and darkness and containing references to high and low art. Finally, after 2000, Warren downsized and began a series of small paintings (20 x 16" oil paintings), “psychological portraits” which analyze human attitudes and conditions, and emotions.

Warren is highly influenced by Pablo Picasso, Goya the artists of the Chicago School (LINK), and neo-expressionism in general. His work has also been termed and can be linked with neo-figuration, primitivism, southwestern and mexican primitive art and religious iconography, as well as cubism.

Selected Exhibitions
Southeast Texas Collective, Beaumont Art Museum, Beaumont, TX, 1975

Houston Area Exhibition, Sarah Cambell Blaffer Gallery Annex, Houston, TX, 1979, 1977, 1976

Biennial Exhibition, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, 1979

48th Southeastern Competition, SECCA, Winston-Salem, NC, 1980

New Orleans Triennial, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA, 1980

Tragicomedy, Mystery, and Humor, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, 1980

Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY, February 1981

Contemporary Drawings, University of California at Santa Barbara, May/June 1981

Figures: Forms and Expressions, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, November 1981

Printmaking Group Show, Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC,October 1981

Changing Visions, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, December 1981

Currents: A New Mannerism, Jacksonville Art Museum, Jacksonville, FL, December 1981

The Human Figure in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA, March 1982

Figurative Images, Georgia State University Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA, April 1982

Agitated Figures: The New Emotionalism, Albright-Knox Gallery of Art; Hallways Gallery;and Hal Bromm Gallery, New York, NY and Buffalo, NY

Magic in Art, Spirit Square, Charlotte, NC, May/June 1982

Painting and Sculpture Today, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, July 1982

Beast, P.S. 1, New York, NY, October–December 1982

Painting in the South, Virginia Museum, Richmond, VA, September 1983

On the Leading Edge, General Electric Company, Fairfield, CT, 1983

Southern Fervor: Religious Iconography in Contemporary Southern Painting, Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, 1983

Southern Fictions, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX, August 1983

SECCA VII, Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC, April 1984

Venice Biennale, US Information Agency and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Venice, Italy, June 1984

Here and Now, Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC, December 1984

USA: Portrait of the South, Palazzo Venezia, Rome, Italy, September/October 1984

New Figurative Painting, Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC, October 1985

Artists Outside Chicago, Phyllis Kind Gallery, Chicago, IL, February 1986

The Printed Image: More Than Meets the Eye, Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, Greensboro, NC, January 1986

Black and White: A Drawing Exhibition, Gallery 29I, Atlanta, GA; the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; and Ewing Gallery, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, September 1986

Southern Contemporary Artists Invitational, Jacksonville State University and Anniston Museum of Natural History, Anniston, AL, September 1986

Dream Faces, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, NY, October 1986

North Carolina Artists Exhibition, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, July 1987

Fact/Fiction/Fantasy: Recent Narrative Art in the Southeast, Ewing Gallery, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, October 1987

41st Corcoran Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, April 1988 – February 1990

Looking South: A Different Dixie, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, October 1989

Images of Faith, Kentuck Museum, Northport, AL, December 1990

Art and Social Vision, Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, Greensboro, NC, January – March 1991

North Carolina 20th-Century Masters, Lee Hansley Gallery, Raleigh, NC, April 2000

Reconstructing Eden: Contemporary American Landscape Painting, Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte, NC, July 2001