"Chronicling Our Lives: 1987-2021" by Willie Birch
Fort Gansevoort New York
Willie Birch has always been a bit of a renegade. Over the course of his 50-plus-year career, the artist has remained committed to Realism, eschewing the commercial art world’s trend towards abstraction and conceptualism. And though figuration itself generally favors painting on canvas, he works exclusively with paper. His solo New York exhibition at Fort Gansevoort earlier this year was a gesture in storytelling that covered more than three decades of his oeuvre with pieces that are animated by the presence of Birch’s own world and the immediacy of his own experiences. As he told CULTURED ahead of its opening: “The best art is motivated by what’s around you.”