Allie McGhee
Reception for the Artist: September 26, 6 - 8pm
September 26, 2019
November 9, 2019
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EXTENDED: November 9th, 2019
Allie McGhee was born in 1941 in Charlston, West Virginia. He has lived and worked in Detroit, Michigan for the last five decades. As Bill Harris states in Essay’d, “Allie McGhee is a seven-day-a-week, 360 plus- days-a-year abstract artist. He has, from early afternoon until the waning of natural light in the evening, followed this blue-collar schedule for decades. McGhee is also an experimenter. He is as intellectually and artistically restless as liquid in porous soil. The range of his curiosity and breadth of inquiry is all encompassing. New directions pop up like spring flowers.”
Allie McGhee’s New constructed paintings fill the pristine Hill Gallery with lyrical energy & compositional density. Folded, scraped, and layered they reveal the memory of their making and celebrate a distinguished history of personal declaration. Allie’s language of colors speaks dimensionally engaging the viewer in a physical investigation of textured surfaces. The exhibition also contains a series of mixed media works on paper that decode elements of the rich cultural history interwoven into all of the painting.
His paintings are in collections locally as well as internationally in museums such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, St. Louis Museum of Art, MO, The Studio Museum of Harlem, NY, Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, MI, Koichiro Iwaski, Japan and Kohler Corporation, WI to name a few.