PRESS RELEASE

Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening of Gallery Selections. This lively exhibition consists of works from the mid-twentieth century to the preset by artists who have used abstract means to achieve very different results. Over the course of the summer, the works in the show with rotate, maintaining a sense of freshness.

The exhibition includes works by several artists who were among the first Americans to embrace precepts of abstract painting. Among them are James Daugherty, who took his cue from the chromatic theories of Henri Matisse and the Orphist Robert Delauncy, and Burgoyne Diller, best known as the leading American exponent of the Neoplastic movement emanating from Piet Mondrian.

Charlotte Park was part a coterie of artist who participated in the development of Abstract Expressionism within the context of the East Hampton art community of the late 1940s along with Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Park’s husband James Brooks. Characterized by a dynamic all-over style of composition, with a rich repertory of abstract shapes and a lyrical sensibility, her work reveals her inspiring interpretation of the movement’s defining ideas of pure painting.

The era of Post-Painterly Abstraction is represented by the work of Gene Davis, a member of the Washington Color School, and Larry Poons, whose canvases reflect his view that “painting IS color, and color is light…light is manipulation the painter.” A product of this time, Dan Christensen challenged the limits, range, and possibilities or paint and form with radical methods throughout his career, such as using a spray gun to create shimmering circles that form allover surfaces of radiating light. Similarly, Jasmina Danowski has a love of “pushing what the medium offers.” Working in oil and ink, she creates multi-layers gestural abstractions in which sensuous natural and biomorphic forms are suggested.

The son of the Surrealist Max Ernst, Jimmy Ernst was exposed in his youth to the rise of the Dadaist and Surrealist movements in Paris. Beginning to paint in the 1940s after immigrating to New York in 1938, Ernst developed from a Surrealist style influences by artist such as Matta and Tanguy to his own unique method in which he merged meticulous patterning, compared to the intricacy of watchmaking, with a spontaneous sense of composition. Teo González similarly uses a painstaking method, producing minimalist paintings consisting of rows or loose grids of tiny drops. Yet his works are deceptively simple, as gradually it is apparent that droplets are each different, referencing a range of visual experiences, such as the sun shinning through tiny holes in a straw hat or molecules in motion.

A risk taker in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Gary Komarin uses shape to create strange and familiar images. Focusing attention on visual nuances, he follows his intuitive sense, portraying objects that are abundant reiterations of seemingly innocent motifs such as wigs and cakes.

There will also be works on view by the noted artists Frank Bowling, John Ferren, Michiel Gloeckner, Balcomb Greene, Gertrude Greene, Pat Lipsky, George L. K. Morris, Betty Parsons, and Charles Green Shaw.