Patrick Webb

Patrick Webb (born 1955) is an American artist who has portrayed contemporary queer experience through representational narrative paintings. He is best known for his "Punchinello" paintings, begun in the early 1990s, which feature a gay "everyman" based on the Italian commedia dell'arte stock character, Pulcinella. Art historians Jonathan D. Katz and Jonathan Weinberg place Webb among artists who that gave voice to the loss and grief associated with the AIDS epidemic by looking beyond the message-heavy activist art and anti-expressive postmodernism of the 1980s to reinvigorated art-historical narrative traditions. Writers note his work for its classically influenced technique and pathos in fleshing out fears, fantasies, experiences and social dichotomies between self and Other, individual and collective, personal and sociocultural. He draws on pictorial strategies from old masters as well as modern artists such as Balthus, Jacob Lawrence, Philip Guston and the magic realist Jared French, building scenarios out of architecturally structured compositions, carefully placed elements and precise gestures. Patrick Webb, Punchinello in America, oil on canvas, 108" x 255", 1995.

Webb has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016) and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Academy Museum, among others. He has been a professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn since 1995 and lives with his husband, a psychoanalyst, in New York City.

Early life and career Webb was born in New York City in 1955. He grew up in a culturally rich environment that included museum and opera visits with his mother, a painter and sculptor, and his father, a partner at Noonday Press; intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin were among their social circle. Webb studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (BFA, 1976), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1977), and Yale University (MFA, 1979) with a classical orientation that focused on observational painting, the analysis of art-historical compositions, and the duplication of old-master techniques. over the next decade, he would be featured in group exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art, Minnesota Museum of American Art and Clocktower Gallery ("Positive Actions: Visual AIDS," 1990), among others. In his later career, Webb has been featured at institutions including the Provincetown Art Museum (2008, 25-year survey), Bronx Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Writers suggest that these qualities lend a tragic-comic poignancy and alienated, determined heroism to the character as he struggles for individuality and identity through rites of passage, everyday experiences, social conflict, and being a witness to and sufferer within the AIDS crisis. Much of this work was featured in his first New York solo exhibition at Amos Eno Gallery in 1993. Several cycles—"Home" (2003–5), "Married Life," and "Punchinello Unloads" (both 2007–10)—place him in ordinary, intimate or comically sad domestic narratives or heavy manual-labor scenarios.

Awards and recognition Webb has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2016), Art Matters (1992), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1988, 1986, 1984). Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Queensboro College Museum (CUNY), Rose Art Museum, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and Zimmerli Art Museum, in addition to several corporate collections.