Winston Wächter Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of Robert Taplin's new show entitled Facts and Fictions, on exhibit from January 11- February 18, 2006. Taplin's last exhibition in the New York area, The Five Outer Planets was comprised of massive, doubled figures (up to 12'h) depicting the planets of the outer solar system. In this new exhibit, he returns to a more intimate scale with a series of figures and tableaus based on more terrestrial experience. However, the new work continues to bring the familiar and the strange, into somewhat startling proximity. The centerpiece of the show will be Sing Tarry-O-Day (for Gregory Gillespie), a nearly six foot high sculpture cast in white plaster, in which a three-quarter scale figure of an artist, shirtless and with eyes closed, rides on a full scale dog with huge ears. The artist, deep in a dream, seems to drift along on the back of his wide-awake mount. The confusion of scales reduces the man to the size of a child, or alternately, enlarges the dog to the size of a horse. A gentle parody of an equestrian monument, Sing Tarry-O-Day is an evocative memorial to a painter - the late Gregory Gillespie.

Three other works in the exhibit are taken from photographic sources depicting moments of intense involvement with imagined realities. In one, The Test, three male cadets scream at a female cadet who stands in deep concentration, resisting their efforts to break her composure. In another, The Re-enactment, two trial lawyers use toy cars and motorcycles to demonstrate how their client died. The last group of works in the exhibition focuses on the figure of Punch, the deformed clown of English tradition (Punchinello in the continental Commedia del'Arte). Punch's comic vulgarity, lack of inhibitions, and his apparent absolution from the normal requirements of society make him a figure of abuse and fascination. He is both a pariah and a free spirit, an alien among us who demonstrates the power of shame and guilt by ignoring them. Taplin's Punch has joined an era in which he appears to be entirely at home; our own.

For further information please contact Amanda Snyder at [212] 327 2526