John Franklin Koenig
Northwest Master, Home and Away

Galen Garwood
New Works

April 3 - 27 , 2008

In collaboration with the Whatcom Museum’s exhibition of John Franklin Koenig, Northwest Master, Home and Away, Gallery IMA proudly presents a retrospective of available works.

John’s abstract paintings weave the story of his epic life onto canvas. While he spent much of his life living in Paris, the roots of his work are clearly Northwest - capturing the mystical qualities of the Puget Sound in his subtle use of color and forceful brushstrokes.

John Franklin Koenig 1924-200. Born in Seattle in 1924, John-Franklin Koenig grew up in the Wallingford neighborhood. He became interested in art at a young age -- particularly the Asian art he found at the Seattle Art Museum. In 1943, Koenig was drafted into the army and fought in Europe until the end of the war. Returning to the U.S. after the war, Koenig enrolled at the University of Washington where he focused on the French language and literature. He studied design and art as well, and was introduced to the Seattle art scene and the works of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and Guy Anderson. On finishing his degree in 1948, Koenig moved to Paris where he lived for the following 30 years.

Koenig organized a series of exhibitions of Northwest artists to tour France. The first exhibition in 1984 was titled Northwest Art in Corporate Collections. The next showcase, Seattle Style, was a show of 12 Northwest artists, and it premiered at Seattle's annual Bumbershoot Festival. This exhibition toured France in the late 1980s. Koenig reflected, "Both shows were imagined in an attempt to further the art of the Northwest at a time when the New York-oriented Seattle Art Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum were completely neglecting the art and artists of the region" (Koenig).

His paintings and collages have been shown around the world and are part of collections in a number of international museums: e.g., the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Musée National d'Art Modern (Paris); the National Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Western Art (Tokyo); the Musée des Beaux-Arts and Musée d'Art Contemporain (Montreal);the Musée de l'État (Luxembourg); and the Seattle Art Museum.

Whatcom Museum Exhibition - March 25 - August 24, 2008
121 Prospect St., Bellingham, WA 98225
Catalogs available @ Gallery IMA - $20

Also on view are New Works by Galen Garwood. Currently living in Chiang Mai, Thailand Galen’s abstract paintings invoke a sense of tranquility and meditation through overlays of organic fields of energy.

Born in 1944, Garwood grew up on St. Simons Island, Georgia, studied art at the University of Georgia in Athens and soon thereafter migrated to Fairbanks, where he studied art, music, and writing at the University of Alaska and later at the University of Washington, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts. He began exhibiting his paintings in 1973 at Foster-White Gallery in Seattle.

John Frankin Koenig
Ode A L'Enfant Picpus
Mixed media on canvas
39"x78" inches
Yr. 1969

Galen Garwood
Parable of the Break
Oil on canvas
48"x72" inches