jameskalmroughcut | George Widener "Magic Circles" at RICCO MARESCA @jameskalmroughcut | Uploaded March 2018 | Updated October 2024, 3 hours ago.
James Kalm has been aware of the work of George Widener for over ten years, having first stumbled upon it at the American Folk Art Museum. As a fan of “Outsider Art” and “art brut”, it was always exciting to see George’s latest works at New York’s Outsider Art Fair.
“Magic Circles” is a selection of new works in a direction that George has been exploring for more than twenty-five years. Your correspondent appreciated this development, and identified it as having a relationship with a current revival of painting based on Euclidian geometry and Formalist abstraction. Widener has also expanded his use of color and shown himself to have a finely tuned palette. We snag George for a brief interview, and get some explanation of his practice and technical points.
To quote George from his press release: “Magic squares, in the traditional mathematical sense, are grids of integers whereby all rows and columns add up to an identical sum. I extrapolated this concept and created the world’s first “magic time square,” where dates are fitted in alignment with the magic square integers—making the dates add up to an identical sum instead.” This program was recorded March 1, 2018 in Chelsea.
James Kalm has been aware of the work of George Widener for over ten years, having first stumbled upon it at the American Folk Art Museum. As a fan of “Outsider Art” and “art brut”, it was always exciting to see George’s latest works at New York’s Outsider Art Fair.
“Magic Circles” is a selection of new works in a direction that George has been exploring for more than twenty-five years. Your correspondent appreciated this development, and identified it as having a relationship with a current revival of painting based on Euclidian geometry and Formalist abstraction. Widener has also expanded his use of color and shown himself to have a finely tuned palette. We snag George for a brief interview, and get some explanation of his practice and technical points.
To quote George from his press release: “Magic squares, in the traditional mathematical sense, are grids of integers whereby all rows and columns add up to an identical sum. I extrapolated this concept and created the world’s first “magic time square,” where dates are fitted in alignment with the magic square integers—making the dates add up to an identical sum instead.” This program was recorded March 1, 2018 in Chelsea.
