William Conger
American
2012
Oil on wood
About the artist
William Conger has been interested in allusion and illusion throughout his long career as an abstract painter. He freely mixes geometric and organic shapes with elements—landscape, architecture, figuration, atmosphere, and the like—that only loosely relate to the visible world. Because he believes that formal arrangements can never be completely non-referential, Conger’s intent is to create signifiers, forms that call to mind many possibilities, but never convincingly depict one particular thing.
Conger begins a painting with marks he makes intuitively, creating shapes, ever mindful of their relationships to one another and the surrounding negative space. He blends paints within them, producing subtle color relationships. Finally, he gives hard edges to the shapes to reinforce linear movement and offset the tightness of the compositions, yielding a synthesized, harmonious whole. The perspective is flat, yet, through the dynamic relationship of forms and colors, shapes appear to float in a deep and ambiguous atmospheric space. Conger provides only the mere suggestion of subjects in his titles Mares and Mesa, wanting to stir desires, beliefs, and memories in the beholder, which,
in turn, will inform his or her response.
William Conger has held a prominent place among Chicago artists for several decades, working consistently throughout in the abstract style. In 2009, a 50 year retrospective of his paintings was shown at the Chicago Cultural Center. Conger’s works are in many public and private collections, including in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute, McCormick Place, and the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, where Conger served as Chair of the Department of Art Theory and Practice from 1984 to 2001.