Patrick Webb.

About Patrick Webb

Patrick Webb 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.