Exhibitions
RED GROOMS: IT'S ALL ABOUT FLOWERS
David Lusk Gallery Nashville / 516 Hagan St. July 23 - August 31st
Red Grooms
David Lusk Gallery Nashville presents It’s All About Flowers by famed Tennessee artist Red Grooms. It marks his very first exhibition at DLG, and it marks his first exhibition that is not primarily figurative. Instead, It’s All About Flowers is a group of 18 watercolors depicting the quiet time – and flowers – spent at his Beersheba Springs hilltop retreat during the Covid pandemic.
Grooms since the 1960s has been recognized globally for his exuberant paintings and constructions that depicting cavorting characters of modern life. He was born in Nashville in 1937, educated at Hillsboro High School and Peabody College in Nashville, The Chicago Art Institute, The New School in New York City and at Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, MA. Grooms’s work can be found in over forty public institutions, including: The Art Institute of Chicago; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; and in Nashville at the Tennessee State Museum and Cheekwood Museum and Sculpture Garden.
The Tennessee-based writer and curator Susan Knowles describes Grooms’ hilltop retreat as “a slower-paced world (as opposed to the hectic, rough-textured, and often claustrophobic streets of New York City) with a romantic sensibility….” In Beersheba Springs, Grooms and his wife built a stacked stone and tree-trunk mountain home with a commanding view high above the Collins River Valley, a heavily wooded landscape, plenty of forest creatures, but no human neighbors. It’s their retreat and they’ve layered the house with rustic furniture and objects, and filled the grounds with summer-flowering plants.
On a big screen porch, Grooms set up a Covid studio and made watercolors of what was at hand. He painted earthenware jugs filled with wild flowers, hand-hewn rocking chairs, hornet nests, mason jars. And he painted the flowers that they have cultivated in the rocky soil over the past two decades. These watercolors feel like his hyper-active urban scenes, but without the people and without the buzzing city. Standing in for his urban characters are the flowers – each bringing their own energy, style, and color to the composition.
Grooms is a storyteller, in the grand southern tradition of colorfully describing people and what befalls them. In It’s All About Flowers Grooms is still telling stories about the flowers, objects and setting. His use of watercolor on rough paper offers a texture similar to his paintings and constructions. In this group he has slowed down the process and his stories have become quieter, but just as colorful.
