Vincent Arcilesi
VINCENT ARCILESI (1932 - 2022)
My work reflects my two great passions in life: the human figure and the landscape. I try to portray the nude form, both male and female, in all its sensuous glory. I have painted compositions since 1964 and started painting landscapes on site in 1966. While at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I was trained as an abstract painter, I fell under the spell of the great French Impressionist paintings in their collection. Over the years, the two strains have become intermingled so that many of my large paintings depict nude figures in various landscapes, mythic as well as real. - Vincent Arcilesi
PRESENTATIONS & FEATURES
Annual Italian Heritage Celebration 2024, Hosted by Thomas P. DiNapoli, New York State Comptroller, The New Italian Heritage Museum, New York, NY
His Three Daughters, 2024, Motion picture written & directed by Azazel Jacobs. Featuring artwork by Vincent Arcilesi. Distributed by Netflix.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024 Blue Eyes Green Fields, AHA Underground, New York, NY
2024 Tribeca Window Gallery, New York, NY
2023 The Spirit of Color, AHA Fine Art, NY
2023 Allegory and Selected Drawing Studies for Allegory, AHA Fine Art, Artsy online exhibition
2021 Memorial Exhibition Nan & Vincent, AHA Fine Art, NY
2015 New Paintings and Pastels: Central Park, Athlens, Santorini & Naples, AHA Fine Art, NY
2017 Vincent Arcilesi Retrospective, Highline Loft, NY
2013 Arcilesi in Rome Part II, AHA Fine Art, NY
2013 Arcilesi in Rome II, AHA Fine Art, Brooklyn, NY
2010 Arcilesi in Rome, The Broome Street Gallery, NY
2008 Arcilesi in Mexico, The Broome Street Gallery, NY
2006 Arcilesi Around the World: Part II, Landscape Survey 1966-2006)
2006 MISSING TITLE 2/20 Gallery, NY, (curated by John Arthur)
MISSING TITLE 2/20 Gallery, NY (Arcilesi Around the World: Part II, Landscape Survey 1966-2006)
2005 Arcilesi in Russia, The Broome Street Gallery, NY
2004 MISSING TITLE2/20 Gallery, NYC (Arcilesi Around the World: Landscape Survey 1976–2001,
curated by John Arthur).
2003 Arcilesi in Morocco, The Broome Street Gallery, NY
2001 Arcilesi in London, The Broome Street Gallery, NY
1999 Arcilesi in Paris, The Broome Street Gallery, NY
1997 Arcilesi in New York, The Broome Street Gallery, NY
1995 Arcilesi in Italy, 2/20 Gallery, NY
1995 MISSING TITLE Carmichael & Carmichael Fine Art, St. Paul, MN
1988 MISSING TITLE Noho Gallery, NY (Also 1985, 1981)
1978 MISSING TITLE Capricorn Galleries, Bethesda, MD
1977 MISSING TITLE West Broadway Gallery, NY (Also 1975, 1974, 1973)
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024 Spring Break Art Show, New York, NY
2024 City, Country, People, AHA Lower level @ Jim Kempner Fine Art, NY
2024 Faces & Figures, Jim Kempner Fine Art, NY
2024 Just Be, AHA Fine Art, NY
2023 Balls to the Wall, part III, AHA Fine Art
2020 Art Miami Special Online Edition, AHA Fine Art
2020 Recording the Nude, AHA Fine Art, NY
2019 Context Art Miami Art Fair/Miami Beach, AHA Fine Art
2017 Art on Paper, AHA Fine Art, NYC
2016 Art Basel/Miami Beach (Hotel Marseille), Francesca Fine Art
2014 Pulse Art Fair / Miami Beach, AHA Fine Art
2013 Aqua Art Fair/ Miami Beach, AHA Fine Art
2012 Scope Art Fair/Miami Beach, AHA Fine Art
2012 Scope Art Fair / NY, AHA Fine Art
2006 Watercurrents 2006: The Figure, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, NY
2006 Whitney Biennial, Mark di Suvero's Peace Tower, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
2002 Artists of the Ideal/Nuovo Classicismo,, curated by Edward Lucie-Smith, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Palazzo Forti, Verona, Italy
1988 Contemporary Nudes, curated by Gerrit Henry and Carola van den Houten, One Penn Plaza, NY
1982 Contemporary Self Portraits, Allan Frumkin Gallery, NY
1981 Art Awards Candidates, American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, NY
1976 America 1976, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Fogg Art Museum, Boston
MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
Hirshhorn Museum, The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, Washington, DC
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
The Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS & REVIEWS
Gallery & Studio, Spring 2025
American Realism, Edward Lucie-Smith, Harry N. Abrams, NYC, 1994, photos
Spirit of Place, Contemporary Landscape Painting & The American Tradition, John Arthur,
Bullfinch Press, Little Brown & Co., 1989, photo
American Artist, "Vincent Arcilesi," Pat Van Gelder, September 1983, cover and photos
Contemporary American Realism Since 1960, Frank M. Goodyear, Jr., New York Graphic Society, 1981, photo
Art in America, "Painting America First," Robert Rosenblum, January/February 1976, photos
AWARDS
National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artists Fellowship Grant, 1982
CAPS Fellowship 198182 (Creative Artist Public Service Program), NYC
Vincent Arcilesi (1932 - 2022) - Biography
Arcilesi attended Furman University in Greenville, SC. Receiving a BFA in Design at the University of Oklahoma, he eventually moved to Chicago to achieve a BFA and MFA in Drawing and painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he met his wife Nan Chapin Arcilesi.
Arcilesi has exhibited in NYC and internationally extensively since 1966, including Solo shows, Museum shows including the Whitney Biennial, the Brooklyn Museum, the Butler Institute of American Art (Youngstown, Ohio), the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, P.S. 1, New York, and Contemporary Museum of Art, Verona, Italy. His work is included in a number of books and other publications and he is represented in numerous collections both public and private, including The Art Institute of Chicago, IL. the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Arcilesi's work has been shown alongside great artists such as Lennart Anderson, Alex Katz, Alice Neel, Philip Pearlstein, Donald Perlis, Wayne Thiebaud, Fairfield Porter, Paul Resika amongst others.
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Since his art school days, the fiercely independent artist Vincent Arcilesi, whose mature work Edward Lucie-Smith described in his book American Realism as a deliberate turning away from the accepted idea of the Modern, has been a prolific painter of landscapes and, more recently, of cityscapes. At the Art Institute of Chicago, Arcilesi was one of the few students less interested in jumping on the Hairy Who bandwagon than in immersing himself in the school’s terrific collection of Impressionist and Post Impressionist masterpieces.
Indeed, Arcilesi invariably includes smaller landscapes and cityscapes in his exhibitions of large thematic figure paintings, set in various locales around the world. And the close observer will notice that many of them, besides being finished works of art in their own right, also serve as alla prima studies for the backgrounds in his erotically charged postmodern allegories. Arcilesi usually reproduces some of his landscapes in his exhibition catalogs to make the point that they are not aesthetic stepchildren but an essential part of his oeuvre. Yet they are often upstaged by the spectacular sexiness of his mural-scale canvases of classically comely nudes striking poses in the streets and plazas of the world’s great cities. People tend to go so ga-ga over the palpable pulchritude he evokes in his figure paintings that they sometimes overlook the subtler charms of his landscapes. The pity of this is that, in doing so, they also overlook the fact that every facet of nature can be as great a source of sensual delectation as the most beautiful human body, when caressed by the brush of a painter as acutely attuned to each and every nuance of visual experience as Arcilesi happens to be. ​In more recent years, working up to theme shows inspired by his travels abroad, Arcilesi has progressed to a species of landscape painting roughly analogous to the
work of those few writers who raise travel writing to the highest levels of literary endeavor. Among the more exotic examples are three 2001 canvases of “Palmeraie, Marrakesh,” in which tall palm trees set
against distant mountains or pink stucco skylines invite the gestural paint handling at which Arcilesi still excels in his alla prima work, passages of which he frequently integrates with wizardly finesse into the backgrounds of his epic figure compositions to retain a sense of freshness and spontaneity within the overall meticulousness of his realist technique. Arcilesi’s seamless synthesis of painterly fluidity and detailed descriptiveness is seen in both the California view “Golden Gate Bridge,”1993, and the Paris scene “Ecole Militaire,” 1997.
However, it is especially striking in “Peterhof,” 2003, which harmoniously melds Imperial Russian architecture and gold statuary with breezily brushed clouds, flowers, and foliage. And he continues to perfect it, as evidenced by “The Brooklyn Bridge” and “Palermo,” both painted in 2006. In the former painting, Arcilesi takes such poetic liberties as adjusting the scale of the New York skyline and even moves
the Empire State Building closer to the shore in order to emphasize the dynamism of the bridge’s soaring span, which he exalts in conversation as being “like a cathedral to me.” The latter painting presents a bird’s eye-view of three tiny female figures in swimsuits striding past the curvaceous aquamarine pool of a luxury hotel, nestled among mountains and Edenic vegetation.
The cinematic sweep of the composition suggests a scene in a James Bond film set in the Mediterranean, as though the camera is about to zoom in on the three women as they head for some mysterious assignation. For here, as in the large figure paintings for which he is best known, Vincent Arcilesi introduces a note of narrative drama that is characteristic of his best work, yet rarely seen in the genre of landscape painting. - By Ed McCormack, Gallery & Studio Magazine, NYC.
Arcilesi retired in 2015 as full professor at FIT, where he taught life drawing and painting for over 40 years.