Changing Perspectives: The Landscapes of Harold Gregor

David M. Sokol, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago, has curated a traveling retrospective exhibition of the art of the Illinois Landscape artist, Harold Gregor. It will show at the new Peoria Riverfront Museum, the Koehnline Museum at Oakton College, and the State Street Gallery at Robert Morris College in Chicago. 

Harold Gregor (American, born 1929) is an Illinois-based painter whose colorful and distinctive Midwestern landscape paintings and prints are both timeless and refreshing. He is part of the generation of artists trained in Abstract Expressionism during the late 1940s and 1950s. Gregor did not initially seek out landscapes as his central subject, rather it found him in 1970 when he accepted a teaching position at Illinois State University and moved from California to Bloomington, Illinois. The landscape transfixed and changed him; he is affectionately known as "The Dean of the Midwest Landscape."

Changing Perspectives includes examples from each of the five series (see below) as well as some of Gregor’s conceptual and abstract works from his early career in California that have never been exhibited.

Gregor’s first landscapes were his Illinois Corn Crib paintings. These are tightly rendered and hauntingly silent Photorealist works that depict whitewashed corncribs as the focal point of a landscape. He soon began exploring the implications and impact of pictorial space. Based on his observations while flying over the prairies and farmland of the Midwest, he developed a heightened and skewed perspective. By disregarding houses and farm structures he could concentrate on the beauty of the landscape itself. His paintings done with rich, romanticized hues as well as those with true-to-life colors draw viewers into the unnoticed beauty of the land around them.

Details about this traveling exhibition can be found here.