See the Sky

The Nemeth Art Center is excited to present T. L. Solien: See the Sky, guest curated by Christopher Atkins. Solien is one of the region’s most prominent, well-respected, and prolific artists and this compact survey of the artist’s career will be organized around overlapping themes, such literature, art, landscape and autobiography.These themes are familiar to many artists, but Solien has a distinct Neo-Surrealist vocabulary that is accented with illustrative exaggeration, multi-colored layered collage, and a sometimes-furtive sense of humor. The exhibition includes significant paintings, sculptures, and works on paper – some of which have not been exhibited before.

See the Sky will show some of Solien’s long-term engagements with classic and contemporary literature. Moby-Dick; Or the White Whale and Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, or the Star-Gazer are echoed in paintings such as Blanket Ceremony and Husband Lost at Sea. His work is inspired by novels in which societal norms are destabilized, such Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Like other post-modern artists, Solien gleans details and mixes sources from each book and his own creative journey. He is careful not to illustrate them though, focusing instead on inspiration, self-discovery, and creative journeys.

Solien’s work is also where he shows his deep knowledge of art history, especially the influence of his favorite artists. Some of the most recognizable artists he has borrowed from over the years are the Sienese painter Duccio, and modernists such as Pablo Picasso and Winslow Homer. Similar to his interest in narrative and storytelling, Solien’s recent paintings are a means to connect with the past through still-life painting, as in Theorem, or religious stories and allegories that mark significant moments of transition like The Renunciation 2. His work also includes pop-culture references to sports heroes and illustration that echo Disney cartoons and painters such as Peter Saul.

From the beginning of his career until now, the landscape of the upper Midwest has left an indelible mark on Solien’s work, “The land is flat, the space is so deep that it seems shallow, and the sense of scale is often distorted.” Landscape is often the setting for and stage upon which Solien’s characters experience significant changes or depart on life-changing journeys. And this knowledge of the evocative power of the landscape has stayed with him as he explored the legacy of Westward expansion and religious journeys, evident in pieces such as Cranberry Harvest and Wasteland.

Similar to the German Expressionists that he admires, Solien’s work is self-referential; an autobiographical construct that is both painfully mundane and mythologized. “What I value as content is a kind of confessional. It’s a retelling through symbols of one’s experiences.” It’s in these works he shares some of his deepest concerns; life-changing moments, the performance of masculinity and parenting, not to mention the sacrifices he has made to live a creative life. In each, a moment of being lost in thought becomes an example for how artists distill familiar experiences into “a larger sense of human experience.”

Solien has had a long career in Minnesota and the upper Midwest region, with prominent solo and group exhibitions at the Plains Art Museum and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Local audiences will appreciate how Solien’s real and fictional landscapes have more than a passing resemblance to the forests of northwestern Minnesota and North Dakota, the area he was born in 1949 and where he and his wife once lived.

Solien is known to many artists as an influential professor. He has taught at The Ohio State University (1990), University of Iowa (1991-1995), Montana State University (1996-1997), and finally, at University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he recently retired after a 23-year career (1997 – 2020).

T. L. Solien: See the Sky. Nemeth Art Center, May 1 - July 17, 2021.

Installation photos courtesy of the Nemeth Art Center