October 17 – November 23, 2013
The gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Gregory Amenoff Trace: Paintings and Drawings. This show includes eleven large and medium-scaled paintings ranging in size from 82 x 76 to 36 x 36 inches, all completed in 2012 – 2013. The exhibition will be on view October 17 through November 23, 2013. There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, October 24, from 5:30 to 7:30.
Amenoff’s new work continues his exploration of the territories one is able to imagine and the landscape of the physical and spiritual world one actually inhabits using a semi-abstract language that is now uniquely the artist’s own. Celestial light and bursts combine with gritty earth and natural forms. Bright, bold colors overlap with mysterious dark depths. The viewpoint is often of an implied figure looking into a highly imagined world. The paintings capture the sublime feeling of awe before nature and evoke the emotional power of the viewer’s experience.
Also included are a series of twenty-five small-scaled color drawings that form the basis for these new paintings. These drawings were made by Amenoff during a month long stay in Paris in 2012. The visit renewed his life-long interest in the Symbolists, particularly Redon (for his glimpse into the invisible through lush light and color), Moreau (for his radical materiality and classical themes), and Strindberg (for his often bleak impasto surges and swells of paint).
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with text by Fionn Meade. Meade writes of Amenoff’s work:
Images of precipice and swell converge in the hybrid terrain of Amenoff’s newest work. Splayed open earth and dry-coil apparitions snake down and rub against verdant crawl from below and latticed forms arching above. In breach of any given architecture, the routes of these paintings beat across horizon lines, boring into visceral geometries, alert and bracing—on watch. For these paintings have heard something rise, sun stained yet prismatic. They are perched, dug under, and aloft. They have come through outlook, overpass, and basin bearing the trace of a restive vision.
Gregory Amenoff (American, b. 1948) lives and works in New York City and Ulster County. He is the recipient of numerous awards from organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts. In 2011 he was awarded a fellowship from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His work has been the subject of over 50 one-person exhibitions and was included in two Whitney Biennials. He is a founding board member of the CUE Art Foundation and is Eve and Herman Gelman Professor of Art at Columbia University where he has served as Chair of the Visual Arts Division.