will duty: paintings

EXHIBITION DATES: November 25 – December 20, 2025

RECEPTION: Thursday, December 4, 5 - 8 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present Paintings, a solo exhibition by Will Duty in the Project Room. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, November 25, and remains on view through Saturday, December 20, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, December 4, from 5 to 8 pm.

In this exhibition, Will Duty presents a set of entirely black-and-white oil paintings. Following earlier work, there is a consistent "abstract noir" sensibility of embedding abstract forms into fields of black. The transition to paint from his earlier graphite works seems a straightforward one: the heavy lead-like graphite of early work was supplanted by the gumminess of oil paint. In somewhat of a departure, a dimension of lightness is explored, rather than the customary black; forms are sometimes embedded into white, rather than allowing medium tones of gray to stand on their own, delicate, exposed, and not always operating under the cover of dark. Two pieces, a pair of rays, are even done as literal inversions.

There are two scales: the bulk are larger oil paintings on conventional stretched canvas, which obsess over hard-edge geometric angularity, mostly zigzags of extreme acuteness, incorporating soft gradients within the allocated spaces. Perhaps acting as a color substitute, an attempt to make as lush a thing as possible while denying the obvious tool to do so, or to dampen the aggressive spikiness. The volumes vary from maximally open parallelograms to maximally closed, shut down to become single lines, almost but not entirely occluding their content. A few smaller pieces explore seeming details of the human form, with subdued intimacy, chiaroscuro, or Impressionism. There is a hint of public versus private between the two subsets.

Regardless of medium, the thinking follows similar pathways: a striving to achieve minimalist, even ascetic goals with obsessive and maximalist tools. No matter how complex something is, it should still be simple. Each work tries to resolve as one visual idea, singular, almost expressible as a sentence, as if following a Sol Lewitt "instruction". The range of moods and references spans from the intimate, the human form, to the possibly vast and impersonal, suggestions of skies, clouds, stars, and familiar elements of the artist's lexicon.

For more information on the artist, visit: @willdutyartist.