Liberty or Death Chuck Webster 2017 oil on panel 84 x 120 in

This survey of works by Chuck Webster, spanning 2009 to 2025, traces the many facets of exploration that define his artistic practice. Bringing together works from multiple series, the exhibition reveals a process rooted in sustained inquiry—beginning with subjects of personal fascination and varied inspirations that Webster expands, abstracts, and ultimately transforms into fantastical shifts of form and context.

Working across drawing, collage, printmaking, and oil on panel, Webster’s recent paintings incorporate an extensive archive of drawings made over many years on antique papers. These works are physically embedded into his paintings using encaustic, or, at times, cut directly into the wood panel and placed like small offerings. In this way, fragments of earlier drawings are reanimated within new compositions, collapsing past and present into a single pictorial space. When asked about a central theme in his work in an interview with Samuel Jablon, Webster said, “I want the pictures to have an internal structure and rhythm. I want to engage the picture plane—I want to make a sacred object, a narrative actor, a story, and an abstract picture at the same time. I try to keep track of all these variables as the picture progresses.”

Ana Delgado

I have been following Chuck Webster ever since he first showed his drawings at the now-defunct ZieherSmith gallery in 2003. From the beginning, it was clear that Webster didn’t get the memo that drawing was no longer necessary or urgent—that imagination and necessity (the mother of invention) were dead. I am glad he didn’t drink the Kool-Aid and become a zombie formalist, but instead chose to be inspired by the art and non-art he encountered and fell in love with.

It was evident early on that Webster worked determinedly to make drawings that were recognizably his own. This is the more challenging path—the one where you reject the comfort of a signature style.

Webster knows a lot about art. He is someone you want to wander with through a museum, a second-hand bookstore, or a flea market. Over more than twenty years of daily drawing, he has made an unmistakable body of work. Employing line, shape, and color on different kinds of surfaces and scales, he has created a world populated by windowless, house-like structures; heraldic emblems; mallet-headed figures; and forms inspired by Hindu and Jain iconography, alongside imaginative responses to Thomas Nozkowski, Louise Bourgeois, Titian, Walter Lantz, and many others.

His voracious appetite has become both generative and generous. Going where each action takes him, Webster is content to remain alone in the world of drawing. We are lucky to be the recipients of his vision.

John Yau

Liberty or Death and Other Stories will be on view at 1GAP Gallery through May 6, 2026.  The gallery is located at 1 Grand Army Plaza, across the street from the Brooklyn Library, a few short blocks from the Brooklyn Art Museum, and easily accessible by subway.

Please make an appointment to view the exhibition. For further information, please email: 1grandarmyplazagallery@gmail.com.

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