Jeff Way

About the Artist

Jeff Way's most recent series of paintings, Eccentric Squares, presents an instant duality between the flatness and depth of a grid. In each of the paintings, while the squares are flat, they create a sense of depth. While the grids gravitate towards the centripetal direction, they are not centered but always eccentric. This stems from an earlier series, Chalk Line Paintings, that the artist began in the late 1960s. The Chalk Line Paintings, also exploring the grid, were followed by image-based work, including masks and performance. 

Way's performances are complemented by the masks the artist creates. Each mask embodies a performance aspect and invokes a Shaman-like connection between the artist and the audience. Way's first solo exhibition entitled Chief of Cherries was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 and built on his inspiration from George Catlin's work. Ultimately, Way's work aims to bring awareness to marginalized and disappearing indigenous cultures. 

Ultimately, whether it is image-based or abstract, Way's work brings up questions of duality. In the series of Grid Head paintings and photocopy collages, the artist merges the standard form of the mask with the grids. Although the Grid Heads are a real mashup of his abstract and image-based work, Way's earlier series of the Monster Mashups and Monk Satie Mix are purely image-based mashups of pop culture's recognizable faces. The duality here is that they are not always so identifiable when they are mashed up. 

Way has lived and worked in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City since 1969. He holds a BA from Kenyon College (Gambier, OH) and an MA from New York University (New York, NY). Way's work has been the subject of a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY) in 1974. Since then, he has had solo exhibitions with Pam Adler Gallery (New York, NY), Mitchel Algus Gallery (New York, NY), Fischbach Gallery (New York, NY), Lesley Heller Gallery (New York, NY), and other notable galleries. He has also participated in two two-person exhibitions with his wife, Carolyn Oberst at Whitewater Gallery (East Hardwick, VT) and VIT Gallery (Seoul, South Korea). Way's work was included in group exhibitions at The Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, NY), The Museum at FIT (New York, NY), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), as well as other museums and galleries. Some of the collections that include Way's work are The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Cincinnati Art Museum.