"WHO WERE — AND ARE — THESE INVENTIVE ARTISTS WHOM THE MARKET, FOR VARIOUS, OFTEN UNDERSTANDABLE REASONS MAY HAVE OVERLOOKED AND WHO STILL HAVE NOT BEEN AWARDED THEIR FULLY DESERVED HONORS IN THE CANON MAINTAINED BY ART HISTORIANS, CRITICS AND CURATORS?"
— EDWARD M. GOMEZ
Thanks to new ways of thinking about art history, especially due to the influence of postmodernist critical ideas, in recent decades, the overlooked or little-known legacies of some of modern art’s most remarkable sleeping giants have been rediscovered and are being appreciated anew. Now honored — and aroused — these artists’ creative spirits and the ideas that inspired them gave rise to distinctive bodies of work for which a new generation of art historians, curators, critics, and collectors have been making room in modern art’s familiar canon and in the broader story of its long, multifaceted evolution.
With Sleeping Giants, Johnson Lowe Gallery pays homage to the inventiveness and originality of three artists who, to varying degrees, found themselves working on the margins of modern art’s mainstream currents, even as, in their own ways, they may now be seen — and acknowledged — for having contributed substantively to the language and expressive power of the art of their time.
