"Motel Window"

Very unique original oil on canvas painting by the well known American artist, John Barnes Dobbs. Titled “Motel Window” and if you look carefully you can see two figures (faces) looking out of the window in the top right and left pane of the window. Circa 1965. Signed lower right by the artist. Condition is very good. Framed with a thin mahogany strip frame with a silver reveal. Overall framed measurements are 27 by 26 inches. ACA Gallery label verso. Provenance: ACA Gallery, New York City.

John Barnes Dobbs, American painter (1931-2011)
By: Mona Molarski

John Barnes Dobbs, a determinedly figurative painter who launched his career in the 1950s against the prevailing winds of Abstract Expressionism, lived to see a time when Realism would co-exist with Abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and a variety of other artistic movements. On August 9 Dobbs died at his home in New York’s Greenwich Village at the age of 80.

During a career that spanned more than half a century, Dobbs painted his own dusky vision of humanity: figures embedded—more often than not—in an alienating, modern landscape of city and suburb. The people on his canvases are often seen in the distance or from behind, as if departing. They ride up escalators, wait on subway platforms or pass through turnstiles. We glimpse their silhouettes through plate glass windows or in the glare of sun on concrete. In his final works, Dobbs’ figures appear against flat backgrounds, iconic as the images on tarot cards: acrobats, boxers and contortionists, struggling against the physics of their own bodies and that of the universe.

Dobbs had many solo shows at galleries, universities and museums. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, and the Salon Populiste in Paris. Dobbs’ paintings are part of the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; the Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH and the Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, MA. From 1972 to 1996, he was a Professor of Art at John Jay College, City University of New York. He was a member of the National Academy, to which he was elected in 1976.