PRESS RELEASE

SPANIERMAN MODERN is pleased to announce the opening on August 7, 2008 of Gallery Selections . Including examples dating from the 1920 s to the present, the exhibition re fl ects many strands of interconnection among artists belonging to di ff erent contexts and generations. In the show are works by Ilya Bolotowsky, Simeon Braguin, Byron Browne, Louisa Chase, Dan Christensen, James Henry Daugherty, Burgoyne Diller, Lloyd Embry, Jimmy Ernst, Jacques Fabert, Balcomb Greene, Gertrude Greene, James Lechay, Myron Lechay, Arthur Okamura, Charlotte Park, Charles Green Shaw, Theodore Stamos, Joseph Stella, and Neil Williams.

The hard-edge geometric works of Burgoyne Diller, Balcomb Greene, and Ilya Bolotowsky reference a universalist vocabulary and utopian ideals, following in the mode of the Neo- Plasticism of Piet Mondrian. Such paintings provide a groundwork for the shaped canvases produced beginning in the 1960 s by artists such as Neil Williams. Like his friend Frank Stella, Williams sought to treat a painting's structure as synonymous with its image, rendering canvases as fl at objects rather than as surfaces for illusionism. Williams's Mock Match ( Paris Series) (ca. 1970s) consists of a taut mathematical structure of triangles and diamonds that retain planar cohesion.

The endurance and breadth of Abstract Expressionism is demonstrated in Jimmy Ernst's Exile ( 1974 ), in which a scratched and abraded surface perhaps re fl ects the dynamics of Ernst's life as an émigré in New York , where he was part of the circle around his father the Surrealist Max Ernst and the noted collector Peggy Guggenheim. Charlotte Park was among the coterie of Abstract Expressionists in East Hampton in the late 1940s and early 1950s that included Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. With radiant reds, oranges, blues, and pinks, Park created a lyrical work that is yet underscored with pictorial tensions. In his Lefkada Series ( 1980 - 81 ), Theodore Stamos used a gestural, painterly means to convey his interest in nature and individual expression.

Forging a unique path within the trajectory of Abstract Expressionism, Dan Christensen challenged the limits, range, and possibilities of paint and form through radical methods such as using a spray gun to create shimmering circles that form allover surfaces of radiating light, as in Nico ( 1990 ). Uniting the image with the painted object, Louisa Chase's The Waterfall ( 1980 ) represents the "New Image" painting of the 1980 s in which artists returned to representational imagery while continuing dimensions of action painting. Other works on view reference traditions of both abstraction and fi guration, considering and combining historical manifestations with innovative personal explorations.