Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening on July 8, 2010 of Gallery Selections , featuring abstract works dating from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Included are paintings by early modernists such as Ilya Bolotowsky, James Daugherty, José de Creeft, Burgoyne Diller, Balcomb Greene, Carl Holty, and Rolph Scarlett. Abstract expressionism is represented by John Little (a friend of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner), whose paintings demonstrate an extreme gesturalism and others, such as Theodore Stamos, whose Infinity Field paintings, named for a Greek island in the Aegean, express the warmth of the sun and rocky coast through intense color and irregularly contoured forms. On view will also be the works of several women associated with this movement, including Mary Abbott, Lynne Drexler, Judith Godwin, and Charlotte Park (who was also close to Pollock and Krasner). The art of these painters has increasingly been given scholarly attention as the notion that abstract expressionism was a strictly male idiom is overturned. The legendary art dealer Betty Parsons was also an abstract expressionist painter, who created many freeform images, in which she responded to the natural world and to the places that she traveled throughout the world.

Abstraction has led in an array of directions over the last half century. The color field movement, initiated in the 1960s, is reflected in the lush, painterly canvases of Frank Bowling and the experimental art of Dan Christensen, who was among the first to pioneer the use for artistic purposes of the spray paint gun and the window-washing squeegee while, throughout the course of his career, he expanded the limits, range, and possibilities of paint and form . Elaine Grove, widow of Christensen, carries on the legacy of David Smith in her welded steel sculptures that evoke the distinctive terrain of Eastern Long Island, where she lives. Other recent permutations by contemporary artists include large-scale works in homemade ink and gesso by Jasmina Danowski, which explore themes of eroticism, mortality, transformation, and desire; the mesmerizing hyper-real images of roiling seas by Clifford Smith, which probe the ambiguities of experience; and the animated surfaces of the works of Frank Wimberley, in which the artist combines the heated dynamics and automatist qualities of abstract expressionism with a cool analytical approach, while he also evokes the jazz music he once played and the beaches and light of Long Island's South Fork.

Other manifestations combining abstract expressionist impulses with personal considerations are seen in the works of Melville Price, who in the 1960s combined allover gesture with collage and Pop elements in mixed media collages on canvas, Michiel Gloeckner, a student of Paul Klee and a member of the Chicago Bauhaus, whose lyrical geometric abstractions reflect his early study of mathematics; Carol Hunt, whose textural canvases bring archetypal forms within our collective unconscious to the surface and just below it, while drawing inspiration from her surroundings on Eastern Long Island; and Demetrio Alfonso, whose compositions of organic and found objects explore the tension between physical decay and spiritual rejuvenation.