* See the recent exhibition Charlotte Park at Spanierman Modern, NYC *

As of January 2010, Spanierman Gallery, LLC at East Hampton was closed.
For further information, please contact: SPANIERMAN MODERN 53 E 58th Street, New York, NY 10022
Phone: 212-832-0208 | Email: inquiry@spaniermanmodern.com

Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening on May 25, 2006 of Charlotte Park: Abstract Expresionist Paintings, 1950-63. Curated by the noted art critic and scholar Ronny Cohen, this exhibition presents the most extensive survey of the Abstract Expressionist art of Park to date, featuring her paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the early 1960s. Many of the works have rarely or never been on view, providing new ways of considering the artist and her oeuvre. A brochure by Cohen discussing Park, her work, and her relationship within the context of the Abstract Expressionist movement accompanies the exhibition.

Park's dynamic all-over style of composition, with its rich repertory of abstract shapes and bold imaginings, made its appearance in the early 1950s. From the beginning she put her own personal stamp on Abstract Expressionism, demonstrating through her art how profoundly well she understood the character of the movement and its means for reshaping reality and for discovering the essence of form and content. The irregular shapes appearing initially in Park's works have as a general antecedent, the animated forms in the emergent Abstract Expressionist paintings of the late 1940s, such as those of Mark Rothko. Eventually Park evolved these shapes into a central feature of her painterly vocabulary, and the paintings in gouache that she created in the mid-1950s, in which references to nature on eastern Long Island appear, are revealing of the emblematic kinds of meaning with which she endowed her art. The wavy lines and twisty organic shapes in her works can be seen as the marks of a lively and commanding gestural hand, while the way that these forms sweep across the brilliant surfaces of a number of her gouaches of the mid-1950s can also be taken as the fascinatingly reductive signs of the ocean, bay, and countryside of Long Island.

# 6 (Montauk) (1954) is one of the oils in which Park displays her skills as a colorist and her talent for applying the relationships of shape and form, light and value, and contrasting colors in ways that are suggestive of nature as her composition is suggestive of the unique merging of elemental forms on the eastern end of Long Island. Both in paintings in gouache and in oil Park discloses that it is hard for her to ignore her closeness to nature. She shared this viewpoint with a number of other Abstract Expressionist painters who worked on Long Island, including Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning.

Born in 1918, Park graduated from the Yale School of Fine Art in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1939. After the United States entered World War II in 1941, she was among the young women graduates of her generation who volunteered to work in Washington, where she was employed by the department of Federal Public Housing and then the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, a special agency that produced intelligence, analysis, and planning in support of overseas Allied military operations. Busy working on behalf of the war effort, she created little art work during her years in Washington, D.C. She moved to New York in 1945 and two years later married James Brooks, an artist who along with Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock and other avant-garde artists had been part of the progressive group based at the Art Students League that congregated around Hans Hofmann. In 1949 Park and Brooks set up studios in Montauk Long Island. Later they moved to The Springs, East Hampton, where Park continues to reside.

During the 1950s Park exhibited at a number of New York galleries and was included in important shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at Guild Hall in East Hampton, where her works were displayed in 1954 along with those of Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, and Larry Rivers. Writing in Arts magazine in December 1957, the critic Martica Sawin lauded works by Park that she had shown at Tanager Gallery in New York, stating: "The vigor with which the paint is laid on, the boldness of color and lively surfaces gives these paintings a genuine appeal and vitality which many second-generation Abstract Expressionists fail to achieve." Yet, the quality of Park's painting, like that of Joan Mitchell-who is also considered a second generation Abstract Expressionist-argues against such a division. In Gathering (1956), Hotspur (late 1950s), and Resurgence (late 1950s), Park created three of the icons of 1950s Abstract Expressionism, in which surfaces are blazing with energy and brimming with the universal passions of life and primal mysteries.

On another level, Park's paintings capture their times. A significant part of the aftermath of World War II was the processing that went on of the war itself. Documentaries and series featuring World War II were some of the staples of 1950s television to which Park was exposed. That war was a theme that interested her can be gleaned from Hotspur, a title that refers to the famous English fourteenth-century warrior "Harry Hotspur." The blasting reds, oranges, and yellows, the silent blacks, the map-like arrangement of forms, with some bringing to mind landscape and some, the figure, result in a composition about a universal event of men at war. Resurgence and Untitled (early 1960s) are other works revealing how, for Park, the process of painting is about getting beyond appearances and, with the discovering of meaning as raised and brought forth from memories, the fears, hopes, and desires of the new postwar world as they became emergent.

The current exhibition builds on a show of Park's art, held in October of 2002 at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York. Organized by curator Alicia Longwell, the show received enthusiastic reviews, including one in the New York Times, written by Helen A. Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York and a noted expert on Abstract Expressionism, who observed that this period in Park's art had not "been seen in depth for many years," and that the show confirmed Park's "status as a New York School Abstractionist of the first rank." The rediscovery of Park continues in the present exhibition, establishing Park's place and significance within the leading American art movement of the mid-twentieth century.