Rick Wester Fine Art is proud to present This Here, Tom McGlynn's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, opening October 16. As in each subsequent presentation of his work, McGlynn - a painter but also a critical writer on painting and the arts as well as an experienced educator - stretches further his exacting discipline of geometric abstraction into areas previously hinted at but not as fully explored. Here, McGlynn has expanded his idiosyncratic color theory and shape-based compositions so that the visual ploys and tensions are even more heightened by his wit and precise vision. McGlynn's painting is moored in a long dedication of a determined practice editing observational painting into abstraction and then into its most essential elements. Similar to Roy Lichtenstein, McGlynn's deft draughtsmanship begins with a sensitivity towards representation, revealing his excellent hand. The four works on paper executed in pastel on colored paper will be a revelation to long-time followers of McGlynn's now sizable career and body of work.

Returning to his favored medium of acrylic on birch panel, the current crop of paintings are complex, intricately weaving his pure language of squares and rectangles and color into images that resonate with echoes of jazz improvisation while conjuring abstract painters that came before him, as if McGlynn met Mondrian and Ornette Coleman at the Village Vanguard and went to work. In his essay on McGlynn's work, appearing in the catalogue that will be available, David Rhodes references musical improvisation when he describes the work as compositions with variable intervals and uses the terms rhythm and meter. With this in mind, McGlynn's painting, Kiss and Make Up, becomes a score of augmented, diminished and otherwise altered tones. Tom McGlynn: This Here (2025) featuring A Proximate View: On the Recent Paintings of Tom McGlynn by David Rhodes will be available through the gallery November 1.