Chuck Webster

Webster is known for his personal iconography inspired by the figure, architecture, and landscape. His bright, playful palate and biomorphic abstraction resonate with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Bill Jensen, and Forest Bess. In these new prints, he carries out a visual language communicating his spiritual and psychological responses to being inside particular spaces, and the progression of that dialogue. Webster has said that making prints is an essential part of this progression.

Through the visible record of the worked copper, Webster is able to go back, check on his course, review where he’s been and decide where to go next. While the overall dialogue is ongoing, Webster is also drawn to the finality and simplicity of the limited edition process that calls for a stopping point and the creation of a finished product: “I am still learning how to understand the nature of where to stop and when to call an etching an etching, rather than to impose something else, some other process, against it. This further informs how I do everything, in art and in life.”

Chuck Webster (b. 1970 Binghamton, NY) received a BA from Oberlin College in 1992 and a MFA from American University in 1996. The artist’s work can be seen in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, TX), the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX), and Archives of the Rothko Chapel in Houston. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the 2018 National Academy Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, The Milton Avery Fellowship at Yaddo in 2010 and 2000, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016, the MacDowell Fellowship in 2004 and 2017, and the Fine Art Works Center in Provincetown MA in 2004. Webster lives and works in New York City. He will have a survey print installation at the Mezzanine Gallery at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in fall 2019.