Untitled (Farmscape with freestanding door in front of shed)

James Castle (1899-1977), born deaf and mute, learned to communicate and interact with the world around him via visual and tactile means. His soot and spit drawings range from naturalistic to surreal. Here, an oversized screen door appears in an otherwise coherent farmscape; the conflation of what is real and what is imagined shows the artist’s ability to combine forms and ideas into sophisticated scenes ripe with creativity. Castle also let his materials and surfaces guide his drawings, visible in the incorporation of surface creases within this composition: the triangular fold on the lower left of the paper is echoed in the barn roof, while the horizontal and vertical folds help establish the horizon of his work.

James Castle’s art has been the subject of multiple major museum exhibitions, including retrospectives organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.