Gregory Amenoff
At All Hours
October 14 – November 27, 2010

The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Gregory Amenoff opening October 14th. This show will include sixteen medium and small-scaled oil on wood panel works completed over the past two years (2009 – 2010) at Amenoff’s Ulster County, New York studio. It marks the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery.

For over thirty years Amenoff has pursued his vision of intense, romantic, physical, and densely woven semi-abstract landscape paintings based on observation and personal interpretation of the natural world. His paintings capture the sublime feeling of awe before nature and evoke the varied emotional power of the viewer’s experience there. Amenoff’s paintings seldom describe specific observed sites; instead they describe the psychic possibilities and the realities of felt places. The viewpoint is often of an implied figure looking into a highly imagined world. Among the titles for the new paintings are Angel, At All Hours, Bocage, Ribbonfall, and Where We Go To Get Lost.

One recurring motif in Amenoff’s new paintings is a lyrical calligraphic leafed vine. The vine is painted in varying forms and colors against different grounds – in some panels moving from dark to light, and in others from light to dark. The compositions are often divided between opposites – bright yellow light and deep celestial blue, or lush fertile green against arid brown or salt white. One critic has said of Amenoff’s recent work, “Color and contrasts of light and dark are pumped up to melodramatic effect. It’s as though you were seeing through the eyes of someone having a transcendental revelation . . . Mr. Amenoff lays on color in generous, brushy strokes, grounding cosmic ecstasy in viscous paint.” (Ken Johnson, New York Times, October 31, 2008).