Winter Street Gallery is pleased to announce Mind’s Eye, the first of five exhibitions presented by the gallery this season. Bringing together three artists — David Byrd, Carol Rhodes, and Frank Walter — the exhibition explores psychologically charged, remembered, or imagined spaces, incorporating landscape and architectural settings, all approached with highly personalized artistic styles.

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In 1958, David Byrd (1926-2013) began working as a psychiatric ward assistant at the Veterans Administration Medical Hospital in Montrose, New York, where he remained for three decades. During his tenure at the VA, he encountered a variety of patients suffering from trauma related to World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Byrd’s extraordinary body of work, produced during this period and the years following, stands as a powerful inquiry into the spaces and individuals he came into contact with. With a deep sense of empathy and artistic sensitivity, Byrd offers the viewer a uniquely human perspective of the world through observations and memory.

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Born in the same year as Byrd, Frank Walter (1926-2009) similarly chose to spend the final years of his life in relative seclusion. While Byrd spent his last 25 years in a small hamlet at the foot of the Catskill Mountains in New York, Walter lived out the last chapter of his life in a self-built house in the hills of Antigua. Describing the artist’s visionary artistic output, scholar and curator Barbara Paca has written: “Frank Walter’s landscape paintings share everything you need to know about about Antigua… In the finely wrought brushwork of these compositions, we gain access to paradises made for people to inhabit even though they are seldom present.”

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The work of Scottish artist Carol Rhodes (1959-2018) shares themes of absence and displacement with Walter’s, offering a depopulated vision of landscapes. While an ecological thread in Walter’s paintings reflect his love for his native land and its rich natural resources, Rhodes’s post-industrial topographies mark a concern for the Earth and its depleting raw materials. Rhodes’s mature works are characterized by sweeping aerial views of roads, valleys, factories, and construction sites intricately networked within an unnamed countryside. Guided by these formal elements, the artist’s highly original sense of color and technical application lends these scenes an otherworldly appearance.

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The exhibition provides a comprehensive exploration of each artist’s practice, in some instances showcasing works that have never previously been exhibited. This was made possible through the close collaboration of the artists’ estates, and in particular Jody Isaacson, Merlin James, Andrew Mummery, and Barbara Paca. Special thanks are also due to the artists’ galleries: Anton Kern, Alison Jacques, and Karma.

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