Hirschl & Adler is pleased to announce our first exhibition of paintings by New Hampshire-based contemporary artist James Aponovich (b. 1948). Opening Thursday, October 24, the show will feature fifteen of the artist’s most recent works including several of his largest, most ambitious efforts to date. Aponovich’s grand still lifes appeal for their unabashedly positive and visionary sensibility. With their exuberant color, billowing clouds and twisting ribbons, these distinctive combinations of landscape and still life are mood-altering. Their vibrant light and almost palpable details seem to spill off the canvas, filling our senses like an exotic Tuscan meal. James is not just the painter; he is the chef, the gardener, the scholar. He has an art historian’s familiarity with his subject―firmly grounded in the tradition of nature morte―and a mastery of Renaissance perspective. Order and balance coexist effortlessly with randomness and natural forms. A looping, sinewy handle of a water pitcher is the perfect foil for the rigid, window-pane grid beyond. Berries of every kind tumble across table tops and won’t stay put.

These works are celebrations of the life James and his wife Elizabeth have built together with their daughter Anastasia; of their annual travels to Italy, and their special home in the New Hampshire hills. The various bric-a-brac in the foregrounds are favorite objects imbued with personal meaning; the tulips are fresh from the cutting garden; the oysters harvested from their weekend at Appledore. The orchid, a gift from a recent house guest, sits over night in the artist’s study. James knows the farmer in Panicale who grows his vegetables. He’s collected the bright textiles on his many travels and has witnessed the distant views from kitchen windows. Reflections of the artist are everywhere, not just in the silvery distortions of a toppled sugar bowl. Know these paintings and you will know James Aponovich. They tell of a life well lived―the stuff of dreams and happiness.

One of New England’s premier contemporary artists of the past 25 years, Aponovich spent time as New Hamphire’s Artist Laureate and was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 2005. His work can be found in numerous public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Currier Museum of Art;; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, to name a few.