Navy Pier, Festival Hall
Booth 221
https://www.expochicago.com/
Goldfinch is pleased to participate in EXPO CHICAGO 2025 - Exposure with a solo booth of works by Scott Wolniak.
Wolniak's paintings can be seen as outward projections of interior spaces, manifesting the ways in which abstraction can convey a sense of rhythm, transformation, groundlessness, and internal movement. His lively, densely-layered canvases oscillate between their indexical, physical surfaces and illusory fields of depth, cultivating a non-objective visual language that embodies the energy of natural phenomena without explicitly representing it. The organic forms that emerge feel tied to the natural world, but importantly, in Wolniak's oeuvre the idea of “natural phenomena” also encompasses the realm of the mind and the nature of consciousness itself.
"I find imagery and meaning in my paintings as they are forming," Wolniak notes. "They are never predetermined. They can be hallucinatory." Humor, exploration and play, and especially intuition have long shaped Wolniak's approach to art making. So too does the Chicago artist’s longstanding interest in material exploration, which continues to provide Wolniak with strong directional paths. Throughout these paintings we see Wolniak experiment with additive elements such as pumice, paper pulp and saw dust in order to build up textures on surfaces, which produces occasional, flickering effects between surface and light.
Scott Wolniak has exhibited extensively throughout the US. His work has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art in America and the Chicago Tribune, and is part of numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee. Wolniak received a BFA from from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002.
