
<p>James Bishop is an American artist who has lived in France since 1958. His exquisitely rendered, relatively rare paintings—which the American poet and art critic John Ashbery once called “part air, part architecture”—combine European and American traditions of postwar art. Bishop’s abstraction is grounded by oblique references to geometry, grids, and architectural structures. In the mid-1960s, he began pouring thinned oil paint onto his canvases and tilting them to layer color without a paintbrush, often leaving areas of white, primed canvas visible to balance such applications of color. Bishop’s paintings are roughly six feet square, reflecting the proportions of his own body.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1980
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 193 × 193 cm (76 × 76 in.)
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- James Bishop
Artist

Painting
James Bishop was an American painter whose abstract work emerged from postwar geometric formalism. Working primarily in oil and acrylic on canvas, he developed a precise, grid-based compositional language that emphasized spatial relationships and color modulation across large surfaces. Bishop maintained a disciplined studio practice centered on systematic exploration of line, plane, and chromatic harmony.
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More by James Bishop
Untitled
2002 · Oil, pencil, and colored pencil on paper
Avant le jour
1986 · Oil on canvas
Untitled Number 2
1973 · Oil on canvas
Early
1967 · Oil on canvas
Tree III
1947 · Oil with graphite on cream wove paper
Tree II
1947 · Oil with graphite on ivory wove paper
Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- James Bishop
- Year
- 1980
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 193 × 193 cm (76 × 76 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1980-116519
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified





