John Dilg: Once and Future

"Like Emily Dickinson with her straitened meter, like Miles Davis with his muffled trumpet, the veteran Iowa-based painter John Dilg knows the power of a whisper…” —Jason Farago, New York Times (2021)

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present John Dilg: Once and Future, featuring 13 paintings completed over the last two years. This marks the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first solo presentation in New York since 2021.

Drawing from a lexicon of earth tones and stylized iconography, John Dilg creates pared-down landscapes that feel familiar, uncanny, and mystical all at once. He exercises a unique restraint while devising his scenes, which are born out of a process of extrapolating a single detail within a found image or dream into a spare natural setting. This process renders each composition with a sparseness reminiscent of an absence or loss while teeming with potential, inviting the viewer to actively look, consider, and participate in their own narrative-building process.

The paintings on view share many characteristics, from their small format to their recurring subject matter. If not for the precise charcoal and graphite outlines of pine trees, rocks, hills, waterfalls, and rivers, Dilg’s forms would blur together in a soft medley of pale greens, blues, and browns. The paint is applied in such thin layers that the woven texture of the canvas comes through, resulting in a surface that is almost pixelated in appearance. And yet, each painting seems to contain its own presence and sense of space that extends well beyond its edges.

The style in which Dilg imagines his worlds recall folk, Chinese, and Indian art while staying rooted in an American tradition of painting spanning from Thomas Moran to Grant Wood. His untouched land conjures up memories of how the American Midwest and West may have looked in an alternate timeline.

John Dilg (b. 1945, Evanston, Illinois) lives and works in Iowa City, Iowa. He earned a B.F.A. in Painting and Filmmaking at Rhode Island School of Design, won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in India and a National Endowment Fellowship in Painting. He taught at the University of Iowa for several decades before retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2017. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Saint Louis Art Museum; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Villafamés, Spain.