Spanierman Gallery, LLC at East Hampton is pleased to announce the opening on May 7, 2009 of Gallery Selections, featuring four artists, Dan Christensen, Jasmina Danowski, Elaine Grove, and Frank Wimberley, who are committed to developing a distinctive, original visual language and for whom the eastern end of Long Island has served as an inspiration.

DAN CHRISTENSEN, whose career was tragically cut short by his death in 2007, was a notable figure in the Color Field movement beginning in the 1960s.  His prominence in the development of abstract painting was acknowledged in 1990 by the noted critic Clement Greenberg, who stated: “Dan Christensen is one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends.”  Charged with a relentless desire to experiment with tools and pictorial space, Christensen expanded the limits, range, and possibilities of paint and form through both systematic and spontaneous methods. His work in this exhibition ranges from the stacked “spray loop” paintings, for which he first gained renown, to paintings in which he conjoined earlier thematic elements. In Vanilla Blue (1998), a bull’s eye assumes cosmic proportions, whereas in Reddzilla (2006), the hyper-kinetic energy of the continuous looping forms reflect the intensity with which Christensen was working at the end of his life.  Christensen, who began visiting eastern Long Island in the 1960s, lived in East Hampton until his death.  This May the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, will hold the first museum retrospective of Christensen’s work.

JASMINA DANOWSKI’s works, rendered in ink and gesso on paper, are multi-layered gestural abstractions in which sensuous natural and biomorphic forms are suggested, while her chosen formats have spurred her to “broaden the spectrum” in a “search for depth and lightness” and a way of “pushing what the medium offers.”  Dense and complex, her works are aqueous, cosmic, buoyant, and efflorescent, evoking at once the momentary and the universal. In an essay, Jonathan Bloom has written: “the direct and largely unpremeditated nature of Danowski’s art-making aligns it with Abstract Expressionism, but her work is closer in appearance to the refined, slow-moving color fields of Helen Frankenthaler than to the energized calligraphy of Pollock or the slashing gesture of de Kooning.  Like Pollock, she paints on the floor, whether working on paper, panel, or canvas.  For the paper pieces, she secures the sheet to the floor with masking tape and approaches it from all sides with a variety of custom-made brushes, some as small as a pencil, others almost as large as small brooms.  She mixes inks on the fly, drawing upon intimate knowledge of pigments gained during many years selling specialty paints to artists in the East Village.”   Danowski’s process entails allowing her marks and colors to develop their own implicit potential, “the story they carry within them,” and the tales they unfold are to be generated as much by the observer as by the artist.

ELAINE GROVE is represented by the welded sculptures for which she is best known. While offering “the rhythmic elegance of David Smith” and evoking the legacy of Picasso, Julio Gonzales, and Anthony Caro, these works reveal “a more personalized and humanistic aura that makes them wholly unique in and of themselves.”  Grove carried on a dialogue in her work with Christensen, her late husband, but where Christensen was a formalist, Grove describes herself as someone who thinks “symbolically.”  Her wit emerges in works such as Food Chain, which evokes self-reflection toward the varied implications of this subject in which we often forget our pre-eminence. Her forms combine a playfulness akin to Calder’s Circus with seeming instruments of Medieval torture.  Also included in the exhibition are a group of paintings and watercolors in which reptilian forms are arranged in dynamic abstract arrangements, evoking generative forces in nature.

A beloved and prominent member of the artist community of eastern Long Island, FRANK WIMBERLEY is known as a painter’s painter and esteemed for his masterly abstractions, consisting of unusual manipulations of paint, color, and texture. Wimberley’s paintings can project the heated dynamics and gestural qualities of Abstract Expressionism, while serving as cool acknowledgements of the factual, non-illusionist components of the artwork.  The selections on view reveal the range of Wimberley’s production, demonstrating his inherent feeling for the expressive potential of material and surface as well as the bold experiments with texture that have long been central to his approach and to his predilection for using physical components to shape a work’s impact.  A solo exhibition of Wimberley’s work will open late May 2009 at Spanierman Modern, New York.