Born 1967, West Palm Beach, Florida. Wilcox earned a BFA in Painting with highest honors from the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he also received the Presidential Award for Excellence in the Arts.
His work is in the permanent collection of the Society of the Four Arts Museum in Palm Beach, FL, Nike World Headquarters in Washington County, OR, and the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, FL and has been exhibited at the Norton-Simon Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL, University Museum at the University of Florida in Gainesville, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL and the GCAC at CSUF in Santa Ana, CA
Besides his 30 year career in Los Angeles Wilcox has exhibited his figurative work, abstracts and sculptures in New York, Miami, Berlin, and Palm Desert and has appeared in publications such as Re-Title, The LA Times, Juxtapoz, Coagula Art Journal, Ocean Drive, and FLAUNT Magazine and can be found in private and public collections across the United States and abroad.
His work has been granted top awards by such prominent leaders in the art world as Ivan Karp (former OK Harris Gallery in NY), New York Times art critic Phyllis Braff, Richard Koshalek (former director of Los Angeles MOCA and now director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Gallery), Joram Deutsch (president and director of the Deutsch Foundation, Lousanne, Switzerland) Suzanne Delahantey (former director of MOCA Miami) and Hugh Davies, (director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego).
Wilcox presently lives and works in both California and on a remote island somewhere in North Central Florida.
Words from the critics...
"Painter and sculptural-installation artist Edward Walton Wilcox manifests an unforgettable hybrid vision. His work is torn between the edgy urban modernism of his real-time generation and the chestnut-toned embrace of Medieval and Renaissance glazes, depicting a pastoral, God-fearing world. Whether allowing a cheeky wit and dark humor to infiltrate cozy representations of farms and valleys, or constructing elaborate altarpieces dedicated to the worship of mystery and omen, Wilcox merges styles and mythologies to moving effect." - Shana Nys Dambrot/ FLAVORPILL
"Portentous but never pretentious, the remote and insular visions of loneliness that manifest throughout Edward Walton Wilcox's work are on full display in this overview of recent paintings. "When the anxieties of this world become too severe," he admits, "I create for myself ... a reflection pool for the mind. It is there that I withdraw to the twilight fields and amber vistas of my dreams." All right, maybe just a tad pretentious, but Wilcox has talent and imagination for miles, so he's excused — besides, one rarely thinks of such timeless art coming from either the University of Florida or Juxtapoz. The eye swallows up his isolated apocalypses in miniature that glow with burnished fury as houses go up in flames and twilit sleepwalkers find themselves in the middle of nowhere. In Wilcox's spaces, no one can hear you scream — they just watch you do it in radiantly muted, sepia-toned slow-motion. His images bring to mind that old Night Gallery episode in which Roddy McDowall has a painting of a cemetery that changed every time he looked at it, until one night — in the ultimate culmination of implications associated with suddenly empty graves — he hears a knock at his door. Wilcox's work is a brilliant and romantic star hurtling through the same galaxy as fellow travelers Odd Nerdrum and Hieronymous Bosch, so if you like your aesthetic dread spiked with the imploding placid inevitable, then this is the art for you." - David Cotner/ LA WEEKLY
“Intelligent, intense, obsessive and very talented, Wilcox can draw, paint or construct anything from his fertile imagination. His gothic sensiblility covers everything from Medieval-style altarpieces to dark parodies of Renaissance portraits, to landscapes that summon-up 19th century horror novels or unidentified flying objects from 21st century Science Fiction and beyond. Beneath all the pyrotechnics is the work of a serious artist, gently jolting the viewer out of conventional thinking and predictable ways of seeing.” - Carl Van Brunt, Van Brunt Gallery, Beacon, NY
"Wilcox uses glazes, paint removers and a sepia palette to construct glossy memento moris such as substance-abusing young blonds and Neutras flambés. Playing off the lurid Gothic Romantic style, Wilcox says his works, like the movement he references, rebuke and seduce..." - Mindy Farrabee, Los Angeles Times
"Edward Walton Wilcox’s work exhibits an eerie quality that is hard to keep your eyes off of. He uses symbols like the Hollywood sign to make suggestions about how today’s Tinseltown contrasts with the city of yesteryear. Moreover, the suggestions he makes are often unsettling. His images are dark, yes, but it’s a darkness that Wilcox suggests should be more closely examined." - Christy Dusablon, Art and Living Magazine
"When I first encountered this painting in LA artist Edward Wilcox’s studio I was stunned by his capture of the essence of wonder. "Self-portrait, 2004" was leaning close to a companion piece that has Edward looking in the other direction, toward distant windmills instead of crosses. Seeing these penetrating pieces in the context of Edward’s working studio was truly a thrill, and while the party(sic) went on, I found myself continually wandering out back to the studio, to stare at this man’s apprehension of the rich, terrifying, magnificent wonder of things." - Jeff Berryman, The Daily Hopper
"Edward Wilcox's visionary paintings conjure a return to the roots of Northern European art caricaturing a deliberately primitive world which, in all ways, is allegory, a grouping of emblems, an assemblage of symbols bearing witness to the truth beyond." - Lucy J. Kim, FLAUNT Magazine
Merging classical technique with modern perception, Wilcox's work is a commentary on a society clasping to garish distractions as a means of escaping the inevitable downfall. His art stands as a moral critique of a world attempting to shroud itself in beauty and diversion in the midst of its own collapse. His intention is for the work to have a preternatural effect on the viewer; evoking at times a sense of awe, terror, insignificance, romantic sensuality, allusions to our self destructive nature, the temporal nature of beauty and life, and the decay of the material world as a constant of which we are always aware. - JUXTAPOZ