Warren Rosser
Warren Rosser was the William T. Kemper Distinguished Professor of Painting, recently retired as Chair of the Painting Department at the Kansas City Art Institute after 28 years.
Born in South Wales in the UK, Rosser moved to the US in 1972. Although trained as a painter, for many years he made sculpture and mixed media constructions. In 1998 he returned to painting, which he views in the broadest sense. His work continues to explore constructed elements that can exist on the wall, but just as easily on the floor. Many of these constructed paintings utilize store bought fabric and carpet built dimensionally but still grounded by the wall or floor plane.
More recently his work has returned to a more conventional form of oil paint on stretched canvas. The work examines an abstract language, exploring architectural forms and constructed space with particular attention being paid to color and its transitions and subtleties. Printmaking is a tool Rosser utilizes to explore different attitudes to form and, particularly in his most recent monoprints, the multi-layer of color transparencies creating the deep implied space.
Selected solo exhibitions have included: Parade: Parallel Tracks at University of Leeds, England, and Jan Weiner Gallery in Kansas City; Repeat Offender at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Counterpoint at Epsten Gallery, Kansas City Jewish Museum; Hybrid View at Albrecht Kemper Museum, St Joseph, Missouri; and Alternate Tracking at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art at Omaha, Nebraska. Previously, he has exhibited his work at the Tate Gallery, London, the KunstMuseum, Düsseldorf, Germany; the Galleria Del Cavallino, Venice, Italy; and at the Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland.