IOWA CONTEMPORARY ART | 58 North Main Street, Fairfield, IA 52556
641-919-6252 | bill@icon-art.org | iconbillteeple@gmail.com
GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday through Saturday, 12:00 to 5:00pm and by appointment.
ICON is an IRS 501(c)(3) non-profit educational charity. All donations are tax-deductible.
IOWA CONTEMPORARY ART
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Celebrating The Hudson Collection
ICON Gallery is celebrating ICON’s collection of Shiva Linga Paintings by showing the entire
collection of 55 works in the Hudson Gallery on the ICON mezzanine. The show opens on
Friday, September 1st, 6:30 to 10:00pm.
Ten years ago David T. Hanson began working with Hudson, Founder and Director of the
New York art gallery Feature Inc., to organize an exhibition for ICON of a suite of 71 anonymous
Shiva Linga paintings that had been assembled by Hudson and the French poet Franck André
Jamme. Sadly, due to the unexpected death of Hudson, this exhibition had to be cancelled.
But two years later Hudson’s siblings granted Hanson permission to purchase twelve of the
paintings. He subsequently organized an exhibition at ICON of those twelve paintings along
with a few of his color photographs of Indian temples. Patricia Hudson was so impressed with
this small show and the Fairfield community’s interest in it that she and her two brothers
decided to very generously donate the remainder of the suite of paintings to ICON’s permanent
collection. In response, ICON created a dedicated space, the Hudson Gallery, to exhibit selections
of the Hudson Collection along with other related artworks.
Shiva Linga paintings on found paper are created anonymously in northwestern India by
practitioners of Tantrism, some of whom are artists, to represent and embody fundamental aspects
of Tantra, a vast and complex spiritual and philosophical practice. Made to awaken heightened
consciousness, these devotional images are used for visualization and meditation as part of
Tantra’s spiritual practices.
Despite their expression of an unbroken, centuries-old tradition, the works in this exhibition
(made between 1966 and 2004) seem both timeless and utterly contemporary. They also possess
a remarkable affinity with examples of twentieth-century abstract art.
NEXT 2024-25 ICON EXHIBITS:
Jim Weidle Paintings
April 5 through June 15, 2024
Three Iowa City Abstract Artists
July 5 through September 7, 2024
Biennual Art Auction
October 4 through December 6, 2024
“Jim Weidle is one of the best artists living in Fairfield‚” says ICON Director‚ Bill Teeple.
“A Jim Weidle solo show at ICON is long overdue. It’s my pleasure to share the
incredible range of his realistic work. He truly is a painter’s painter. I don’t think
anything could set the stage for experiencing his art better than his own words.”
JIM WEIDLE ARTIST STATEMENT
Recently, I was invited to give a talk to the art students at Horace Mann School
in NYC. The talk was improvisational and even sprawling at times. I mentioned the
poet Howard Nemorov who once observed: “If you want to see something, look at
something else.”
I seem to trot this one out from time to time. Nemorov would appear to suggest
the visible world is tricky, just a bit elusive, even fleeting. Disclosure is not direct or
immediate. Perhaps the visible world reveals itself by other means.
Some say I am a ‘realist painter’. What does that mean? Georgia O’Keefe contends,
“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are ambiguous, confusing. Content
requires selecting, omitting, and emphasis or de-emphasis.”
And Bertolt Brecht: “Realism is not what real things are like, but what things are
really like.”
What do you think? The Weidle Solo show is up at ICON for nearly three months.
Remain adrift within the movement of these works for however long you can wander
with them.
Painting can be a generous thing. It has the decency to hold still. Allowing the eye a
tiny but wild freedom: to travel as it will.
— Jim Weidle
Information on the artist is available on his website at weidleart.com
ICON would like to bring to your attention that Jim Weidle along with two other ICON
artists, Gillian Brown and Judy Bales are now being featured in a show at the Cedar
Rapids Museum of Art through May 19th.
