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Spanierman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening
on July 21, 2005 of Artists and Nature on Eastern Long Island: 1940s
to the Present. Curated by the noted art critic Ronny Cohen, this
postwar and contemporary survey explores some of the most exciting
chapters in the rich history of Long Island landscape art. The exhibition
will present over fifty works by over thirty-five artists, ranging
from Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, William Baziotes,
Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers to John Alexander, Ross Bleckner,
Dan Christensen, Jane Freilicher, April Gornik, Dorothea Rockburne,
Donald Sultan, Esteban Vicente, and Jane Wilson.
The exhibition starts with the groundbreaking generation of the
Abstract Expressionists, who, in establishing a new artist’s
community in The Springs and East Hampton in the 1940s and 1950s
produced fresh and innovative ways of representing landscape and
nature. According to Cohen: “The sun and light, beach and
ocean, trees and grasses, all found their way into a number of the
Abstract Expressionist and Abstract Expressionistic-related paintings
and works on paper on view.” Examples by Krasner, Pollock,
Baziotes, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, James Brooks, Balcomb Greene,
Stanley William Hayter, Friedel Dzubas, John Ferren, Charlotte Park,
Grace Hartigan, and Alfonso Ossorio invite a fresh reappraisal of
nature’s role in the development of Abstract Expressionism.
Krasner was especially revealing about her love of nature and pure
painting and her successful merging of the two in the sweeping passages
and dynamic overall structure of Sun Woman II (1957) one of the
last of her monumental canvases of the 1950s not in a public collection.
The contemporary artists featured in the exhibition represent the
notably diverse group that has been drawn to both vacation and work
on eastern Long Island since the 1960s. Nature’s wide-ranging
impact on representational, abstract, and conceptually based art
will be showcased in examples by the aforementioned artists as well
as Norman Bluhm, Ilya Bolotowsky, Connie Fox, Paul Georges, Elaine
Grove, Polly Kraft, Christina Schlesinger, Roy Nicholson, and Adam
Straus.
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