Bowery Gallery at 40
Chelsea Opening of Pages June 24
By: Bob Fowler - Jun 15, 2010
The Bowery Gallery is presenting Pages, a special group exhibition to celebrate its fortieth anniversary. Pages, which includes black and white works on paper from 39 current gallery members, will run from June 22 through July 10. The Gala Opening Reception on June 24 will feature a slide presentation of works by some of the nearly 150 artists who have been affiliated with the gallery over its history.
During its forty years of continuing existence the Bowery Gallery has represented an alternative to the increasingly media-dominated culture of the commercial gallery scene. Founded in the fall of 1969 in a storefront on the Bowery near First Street, the gallery provided its eighteen founding members an independent venue for their investigations of the legacy of Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture.
While looking back to art’s rich figurative tradition, they also took inspiration from the mix of abstraction and representation that emerged from the vital coop gallery scene of the 1950s, from intense debates at the Figurative Artists’ Alliance, and from the New York Studio School’s extension of Hans Hofmann’s teachings.
As painting and sculpture have weathered changing fashions in the larger art world, the gallery has built upon these broad-based sources of inspiration. The results are evident in the variety of works in this show. Ranging from abstraction to realism, the works are united not just by their limitation to black and white but by the way this very limitation highlights their common foundation in drawing: in shared understandings of light, space and the plane. More than just a formal heritage, this is a framework for vision in the largest sense.
The Bowery Gallery, which moved in 1972 to Greene Street and in 1980 to Wooster Street in Soho, has been located since 2000 at 530 West 25th St. in Chelsea.
The opening reception is from 5-8 pm on Thursday, June 24. A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Deborah Rosenthal accompanies the exhibition. For further information, please contact the gallery at 646.230.6655 or www.bowerygallery.org