Spanierman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening on April 25, 2013 of Dripping! Pouring! Staining! presenting an array of vibrant works by artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Eschewing the use of just the paint brush to define form, the artists in this exhibition developed from Abstract Expressionism to explore the versatility of oil and acrylic, creating distinctive, individually expressive works.

One of the most prominent artists to emerge in the 1950s, San-Francisco painter Sam Francis created works that have been described as “elegantly explosive.” Exploring color and light through active staining and flung paint, he produced radiant and open images, exemplified by Tokyo (1965), which owes to the influence on Francis of the art of Japan. Paul Jenkins, who also developed his career in the mid-twentieth century, was committed to a tactile, experimental method, demonstrated in Phenomena, Spectrum Hour Glass (1971), where the undulating poured paint creates a seemingly liquefied, almost molten surface. Friedel Dzubas, a friend of Jackson Pollock, is represented by Red Flight (1957), exemplifying the artist’s use of swirls of energized color to evoke “mind storms” and sea surges.

Several artists began to receive notice in the 1960s. Stanley Boxer was “discovered” in the decade by Clement Greenberg as a Color Field painter, but went on to create a body of work that has been described as “maximalist,” in which he sustained a love of blending seemingly incongruent materials to create surfaces that exude a sense of Baroque excess, luminosity, and movement. Also admired by Greenberg, Dan Christensen pioneered the use of the spray gun and the window-washing squeegee to produce works that range from his lyrical stains, referencing jazz, such as Beulah Land (1978) to the spinning bull’s eyes created with the spray gun, such as Blues for Kenny (1997), with its mesmerizing mandala-like centering effect. Syd Solomon, an artist who lived in Sarasota, Florida, and associated in East Hampton, New York, with Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, is recognized for using acrylic pigments with a sweeping gestural force, creating images evocative of experiences of nature, especially coastal light on reflective water. A teacher of mathematics, Jack Roth departed from the geometric in his art, exploring interactions of irregular shapes that unfold or contract across the canvas, as in his Rope Dancer series of 1980, expressing a freedom from life’s constrictions. An artist who died at the young age of fifty-four, Neil Williams evolved from mathematically conceived shaped canvases to energetic constructions combining muscular strength with balletic control, as in Atomic Gun (from Skins Series) (ca. 1985), created in acrylic and including in its mediums, foam brushes and plastic toy guns.

Several contemporary artists have built on past traditions to form personal styles. Frank Bowling, the first black Royal Academician and an artist honored with the Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) for his service to art, has evolved in his work over a long career. In the exhibition are Simon & Mathew (1975), one of Bowling’s glistening fountains created from pouring paint onto unstretched canvases from a great height, Kadambischoice (1980), a vertical canvas in which the paint seems to rise from within the canvas and splinter into shards of light, and Not Belladonna (2011), in which Bowling used a stitching method, reminiscent of the seamstress work created by his mother when he was child, to produce a canvas of heated reds and oranges. Carol Hunt uses flung, dragged, and dripped paint to produce images that are calligraphic in nature, challenging us to untangle their hieroglyphic meaning. Susan Vecsey’s staining methods produce enigmatic abstractions in which landscapes seem to form in our minds. James Walsh pushes the direct application of paint in the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic to an extreme, the ridged lines of color pushing forward from the surface contesting the notion as to what is brushstroke versus paint. In The Distance (2010), his few broad strokes of color create the illusion that the painting is a blown-up section of a larger work or that the edges are arbitrarily interfering with an image more expansive than what we can see.

As the range of works in this exhibition reveal, the methods of dripping, pouring, and staining have become integral to painting today, the many nuances within them enabling artists to find vital and personal languages of form and feeling.

Spanierman Modern
53 East 58 Street
New York (NY) 10022 United States
Tel. +1 (212) 8321400
inquiry@spaniermanmodern.com
www.spaniermanmodern.com

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Monday - Saturday
From 9:30am until 5:30pm