Greenville County Museum of Art

Jun 19, 2019 — Sep 8, 2019

A category of painting mediums that are water soluble, watermedia includes watercolor, gouache, ink, acrylic, casein, and tempera. This exhibition surveys examples by American artists working over almost a century—from such early Modernists as Georgia O’Keeffe and Charles Burchfield to contemporary South Carolina Realists Mary Whyte and Margaret Peery—employing a wide range of techniques to realize traditional subjects as well as non-objective abstraction.

Two mid-twentieth century masters demonstrate the full potential of watermedia. Andrew Wyeth rendered an extraordinary universe of objects in drybrush technique. He was equally adept at capturing the fluidity of fire and smoke as well as humid atmospheric conditions in wet-in-wet washes. Hans Hofmann, by contrast, distilled the essential thesis of Abstract Expressionism in his intuitive explosion of pure liquid exuberance: the medium is the message.