Jon Schueler: Five Decades

Jon Schueler was born in Milwaukee in 1916 and studied at the California School of Fine Arts. In 1951 he moved to New York where his mentor Clyfford Still introduced him to Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. By 1957, Schueler was established as a leading figure in the second generation of abstract expressionists, and a one man show of his work was the opening exhibition of the celebrated Leo Castelli Gallery. That same year Schueler made his first visit to Mallaig, a fishing village on the west coast of Scotland, and memories of the Scottish light and landscape continued to inform his paintings throughout the 1960s. In 1970 he returned to Mallaig where he lived until 1975, and where he spent considerable time each year until his death in 1992.

This exhibition paired a major painting from every decade of his working life with a group of related works on paper, and revealed something of Schueler's journey from the pure abstraction of New York in the 1950s to an art that was grounded in the light and atmosphere of the Scottish west coast.