The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Visual Grant to John Mendelsohn for his New Color Wheel paintings, which will expand on his previous series, with circular forms and rays of color projecting from their centers.

The New Color Wheel paintings are on a larger scale, with an expanded range of colors, and with paint applied with a more varied facture and energy. These paintings’ radiating forms conjured up the phrase “a song of flowering and fading” – a poetic motive and a way to consider the beauty and tenuousness of our lives.

Over the past three decades, John Mendelsohn’s abstract paintings have explored shifting visual movements and optical excitations. In exhibitions in the US and abroad, his cycles of paintings have created “an architecture of images” – individual works that become a collective presence and transform a space.

Running through Mendelsohn’s paintings is a sense of flux in many visual forms – turbulence, moiré patterns, waves, and phantom phenomenon – and in the manipulation of paint by combing, marbleizing, dispersion, and other techniques. At the same time, the paintings suggest emotional undercurrents and a range of poetic images. The paintings have drawn on a variety of models, including minimalist music, the fluid dynamics of water, and textiles such as ikat. Color has been a central element, whose relationships create unexpected harmonics and overtones.

Mendelsohn’s recent exhibition at the David Richard Gallery in New York included two series, the Color Wheel paintings from 2020, and the Tenebrae paintings from 2014. In his review in Hyperallergic, John Yau wrote that the work embodies “the movement of color and light across planes and through space. The intention may not be spiritual, but a number of paintings in both series propose that this interest might arise out of a sense of the sacred, manifested in the transportive power of light.”

Mendelsohn is working on New Color Wheel paintings, which expand on the previous series, with circular forms and rays of color projecting from their centers. The form suggests a color wheel, a device with divisions of different hues used to show color relationships. The paintings reveal myriad color interactions, in gradated progressions that create a sense of emanating and reflected light.

The fine rays which begin at the centers of the discs coalesce into dense, star-like projections. The discs and rays suggest many associations beyond color wheels: flower forms, chromotherapy, spinning wheels, the movement of time, the piercing appearance of the unexpected, and many more.

Mendelsohn’s solo exhibitions include David Richard Gallery, Artists Space, Scholes Street Studio, Sideshow Gallery, 57W57ARTS, Kook Projects, Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, Michael Walls Gallery, Hal Bromm Gallery, Rupert Ravens Contemporary, Fairfield University, University of Rhode Island, and Milliken University.

His group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale, Nordiska Kompanient, P.S.1 The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; Hallwalls, and Wellesley College Museum.

Mendelsohn’s exhibitions have been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, The New Criterion, The Huffington Post, Arts Magazine, Artnet, and d’Art International Magazine. He received a BA from Columbia University, participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and received an MFA from Rutgers University.

Please visit John’s Instagram, Facebook, and his website for more information.