Michael Dwyer

In his decades-spanning practice, Michael Dwyer has focused on making abstract paintings that place color front and center. His recent work deploys crisp-edged chunks of translucent color that meander, zigzag, or float through the composition. The paintings are improvisational structures that often reveal evidence of their evolution.

Dwyer earned an MFA from the University of South Carolina and a BFA from Syracuse University. His work has been in numerous juried exhibitions. Most recently Dwyer’s work was included in the exhibition This is the Future of Non-Objective Art! presented by The Atlantic Gallery.

“Michael Dwyer does beautifully refined paintings that guide the viewer into an experiential exploration of color and texture. The overall composition is highly controlled with many details being spontaneous surprises.”
- Philip Mullen

Artist's Statement

As a kid, I was surrounded by modern art at home - mostly my father’s paintings. I loved visiting my dad's studio. I liked the spattered dishevelment, the smell of paint, and the paintings that I couldn't fully understand, but instinctively grasped as the works came to life. I knew at an early age that making art was something I wanted to pursue.

A sense of movement has been an important element in my work for many years. Earlier pieces often conveyed a feeling of forms drifting in space. Then there was a shift toward using linear compositions to create direction. I wanted your eye to move along a variety of paths and have experiences along the way. My paintings relate to movement, physically, but also as it exists in music. I also found from my earlier collage work that I like shapes in my paintings to have crisp, assertive edges like those that came from using scissors. Pieces are sometimes informed by elements of our environment like billboards, architecture, and graffiti. Ultimately, I’m always chasing that transcendent moment where color, shape, and movement come together in a way that‘s thrilling and right.

Essay by Catherine Walworth, Ph.D.

Painting is a visual language that speaks with its own rhythm, organizational syntax, and lyrical cadence. To look at Michael Dwyer’s paintings is to give yourself over to looking at colors and shapes and textures that exist playfully on the surface of a plane, yet in a seriously complicated way.

At first, one’s eye wants to track the upper layer of painted structures that bend and jerk like a conga line of conjoined dancers, and then you see how many layers and purposefully altered decisions went into the build-up of his paint below. Dwyer thinks of these strata as akin to the layering of instruments and the interweaving medley of sounds that happens over time in a piece of music.

Also like jazz, there is a tension between the sense of control and improvisation in Dwyer’s paintings. One can follow the jig across the painted surface, where bars of color bend and intersect, approach the limits of the painting’s edge only to stop short, or carry on into imagined elsewheres. Each bar is a different color, and in that bar are layers of past color choices, sometimes fighting to rise to the surface like a ghost, and other times anonymously adding layers of thickness to the final opaque color choice. This density and subtle quality of relief give the paintings an objectness, and asks the viewer to walk back and forth to take in little shadows, amplifying the sense of rhythm and movement.

Dwyer uses a palette knife to scrape and smooth paint, but also whatever is at hand. While he used to paint in a more organic, rounded, and gestural way with a brush, now he is a happy workman, troweling his bricks of color into built worlds. The paint layers in the background offer up clouds of color on which the hard-edged bars float in a colorful ether. As with Kazimir Malevich’s or Ellsworth Kelly’s geometric forms that hover on the painted surface, seeming to take a living breath, there is a sense of “being in the world” in Dwyer’s forms in space. They, too, feel as if they are hovering and jostling, announcing their impossible sentience.

Dwyer and I have at various times marveled over painting and how so many seemingly disparate parts could come together in a composition that teeters on the edge of falling apart during the making, only to have the artist stop when it seems inexplicably “right.” There is a resolution that cannot always be explained, particularly when there is no figurative subject matter to gauge, but the result is astounding, and each time the conditions of a painting’s “rightness” are excitingly different.

But then, Dwyer has been trained from childhood to recognize the fitness of compositions. His parents, both painters, raised him in a home in which modernism was the thing, and took him to museums as a natural practice. His paintings speak directly to so many of the artists’ styles that he has absorbed by faithful looking— Paul Klee, Brice Marden, Piet Mondrian, Elizabeth Murray, and Frank Stella, to name a few. Stuart Davis is close to home at this stage in Dwyer’s career. Like Davis who pronounced his direct connection with jazz, Dwyer comes back again and again to his love of music when describing his process, as well as his evangelical adherence to abstraction. This exhibition’s title, “Swing Set,” is an homage to Davis, as well as a reference to music and play. Because above all, paintings should be thrilling to make and see.  

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS         

2023, Michael Dwyer: New Work, Mike Williams Art, Columbia, South Carolina

2019, Swing Set: Paintings by Michael Dwyer, The Goodall Gallery at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina

2017, Six Uncut Keys to a Paint Store: Recent Work by Michael Dwyer, Roy C. Moore Gallery, University of North Georgia

2010, A Phonic Swath: Paintings by Michael Dwyer, The Etherredge Center for Fine and Performing Arts, USC Aiken, Aiken, South Carolina

2000, Recent Paintings, 80808 Gallery, Columbia, South Carolina

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2020, The Shape of Things, 701 Center for Contemporary Art, Columbia, South Carolina

2018, ArtFields, Lake City, South Carolina

2017, ArtFields, Lake City, South Carolina

2016, ArtFields, Lake City, South Carolina

2015, ArtFields, Lake City, South Carolina

2014, ArtFields, Lake City, South Carolina

2013, Color Movement: Paintings by James Dwyer and Michael Dwyer, Anastasia and Friends Gallery, Columbia, South Carolina

2011, Founder’s Dinner, The Cultural Council of Richland and Lexington Counties, Columbia, South Carolina

2009, Out and In, Gallery 313, Anderson, South Carolina

2006, Twenty-seventh Annual Juried South Carolina Artist’s Exhibition, Pickens County Museum, Pickens, South Carolina

2006, Thirty-first Annual Juried Exhibition, Anderson County Arts Center, Anderson, South Carolina

2003, Now at City Art: Michael Cassidy, Mike Dwyer, May Reisz, and Tim Turner, City Art Gallery, Columbia, South Carolina

2001, Hub City Annual Juried Exhibition, Spartanburg County Museum, Spartanburg, South Carolina

1991, Sixteenth Annual Juried Exhibition, Anderson County Arts Center, Anderson, South Carolina

EDUCATION

Master of Fine Arts, University of South Carolina, 1993

Bachelor of Fine Arts, Syracuse University, 1985

AWARDS

2008, Merit Award, Anderson County Arts Center, Thirty-third Annual Juried Exhibition

2006, Merit Award, Anderson County Arts Center, Thirty-first Annual Juried Exhibition

1991, Merit Award, Anderson County Arts Center, Sixteenth Annual Juried Exhibition

1991, Merit Award, University of South Carolina, Student Art Exhibition

1985, Honorable Mention, Syracuse University, Senior Painting Awards

COLLECTIONS

The University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina

Mr. Daniel Richardson, Columbia, South Carolina

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Israel, Columbia, South Carolina

Ms. Christine Wojcik, Columbia South Carolina

Dr. and Mrs. Tristan Weinkle, Columbia, South Carolina

Southeastern Esthetics Institute, Elgin, South Carolina

Ms. Debbie Parker, Columbia, South Carolina

Ms. Amy Love, Columbia, South Carolina

Mr. And Mrs. Leighton Lord, Columbia, South Carolina

(Estate of) Ms. Leslie Pierce, Columbia South Carolina

Mr. Alvin J. Neal, Irmo, South Carolina

Ms. Ellen Woodoff, Aiken, South Carolina

Mr. and  Mrs. E. Bradford Meadows, Greenville, South Carolina

Mr. Robert T. Lyles, Columbia, South Carolina

Mr. Doak Wolf, Columbia, South Carolina

Mr. Robert Wizlinski, Columbia, South Carolina

Mr. Donald Scalia, Rochester, New York

Ms. Joann Schwartz, Columbia, South Carolina