Exhibition News: Biala at Berry Campbell (Mar 14-Apr 13)

Biala: Paintings, 1946-1986

March 14 - April 13, 2024

Opening reception: Thursday, March 14, 6-8pm

Berry Campbell
524 West 26th Street
New York, NY  10001

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NEW YORK, NY – Berry Campbell and the Estate of Janice Biala are pleased to announce a major survey of paintings by Janice Biala (1903-2000). The survey featuring over 20 paintings dating from 1946 to 1986, marks the largest gallery exhibition of Biala's work mounted in New York City with many works on view for the first time. A fully illustrated 100-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition which includes introduction by Mary Gabriel, author of “The Ninth Street Women,” and essay by Jason Andrew, manager and curator of the Estate of Janice Biala. This historic presentation coincides with the Grey Art Museum’s seminal exhibition “Americans in Paris, 1946-1962: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962,” opening March 2 in which Biala will be featured.

One of the most inventive artists of the 20th Century, and the painter most closely aligned with the continuation of a transatlantic Modernist dialogue between Paris and New York, Janice Biala (1903-2000), led a legendary life: a painter recognized for her distinctive style that combined the sublime assimilation of the School of Paris and the gestural virtuosity of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism.

Biala rose from humble yet tumultuous beginnings as a Jewish immigrant from Russian occupied Poland arriving in New York in 1913 settling among the tenements of the Lower East Side. She claimed the name of her birthplace for her own, going on to make personal and unique contributions to the rise of Modernism both in Paris and New York.

Having spent the decade of the 1930s as the last companion to the English novelist, Ford Madox Ford, Biala was the perfect representative of American bohemia in 1930s France and her journey as an artist evolved in tandem with the historic events of the 20th century. 

Highlighting this survey is a pivotal group of paintings dating from 1947 to1952. On view for the first time in New York, these works were painted by Biala upon her triumphant return to Paris in 1947 aboard the de Grasse, one of the first passenger transatlantic ships to sail from New York to Europe after World War II. Her return was also a joyous one, “I still find in France all the things I’d hoped for,” she wrote her brother Jack Tworkov, “I’d have no use for Paradise if it wasn’t like France.” These works offer an extraordinary opportunity to see Biala’s close connection to European Modernists like Picasso and Matisse, both of whom she had frequently met.  

"Discos and Dancers" at Picture Theory, NYC (Mar 15-May 11)

Demonic Disco, 1984

Picture Theory presents “Discos and Dancers” from the Estate of George McNeil

March 15–May 11, 2024

Opening Reception March 14, 6–8PM

Picture Theory

548 W 28th Street, Suite 238 

New York, NY

“As George McNeil gets older, his work gets younger,” observed critic Michael Brenson upon seeing the 80-year-old artist’s latest work (1). Inspired by his love of movement in Balanchine and Afro-Cuban dance, the rise of MTV, and the beats of John Coltrane, the Supremes, and Tina Turner filling his studio, McNeil embarked on the most exuberant and youthful series of paintings of his career throughout the 1980s until his passing in 1995. For example, his “Disco Series,” begun in 1981, captures the raucous, rapturous energy of New York nightlife. Weightless, colorful figures float across boundless, groundless space. The push and pull of color finds analog in the oppositional tension of limbs askew, torsos off kilter, and heads inverted, evoking the transcendent euphoria of the dancefloor.

With titles like Demonic Disco, the series conjures the conspiratorial relationship between music and dance to possess all senses of the body. The dynamic, sinuous lines, acidic colors, and surging brushstrokes strive for what the artist called, “pictorial sensateness,” or sensation experienced in form. Yet in these paintings, an ambiguity and disquiet pulses beneath the manic exhilaration, fantasy, and sexuality. Disco is, after all, a solitary dance, in that bodies move alone without touching other bodies. In these crowded disco canvases, figures may overlap, but they never seem to actually touch. A self-described humanist, McNeil lends pathos to the mythological, sometimes tragic, often sensual, Dionysian tales of the New York night.

The 1980s saw the Abstract Expressionist painter fully reveal the figure that had been lurking beneath his vibrant and spontaneous impastoed abstractions in decades prior. Dancers, bathers, and other human forms began emerging from fields of color in the 1960s. By the 1980s, McNeil had introduced bold, colorful outlines to sharpen their distinction from their painterly surroundings. The figures also became less universal and more specific, referencing punk rockers, football players, or the urban types encountered on Park Place and 47th Street.

For McNeil, these later bodies of work did not mark a significant break from his early abstract compositions. In an interview, he mused that “it seems to me that my work has always had not a human figure image, but it always had a figural image. ...I’m not a figure painter at all. I’m an abstract painter where I hope that bringing in the figure brings in certain human or psychological connotations or associations, and I hope that deepens the meaning of the picture.”(2) Expressionism, above all else, is paramount.

McNeil enjoyed a late career renaissance as critics found affinities in these paintings with German Expressionism, COBRA, Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, and more contemporary developments in Neo-Expressionism and graffiti art. Yet, McNeil’s “figural images” exude a personal, empathetic, and passionate warmth unique to an artist dedicated to articulating the complexities of our inner and outer worlds. His forceful compositional choices, singular color palette, and virtuosic application of paint evidence an artist passionately driven by the endless pursuit of plastic expression.

- Kara Carmack, March 2024

For more information, please visit picturetheoryprojects.com

News: Estate of Edith Schloss now Represented by Alexandre Gallery

Alexandre Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Edith Schloss: Blue Italian Skies Above, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition of works by the artist (1919-2011), marking its representation of the estate. Examining Schloss’s work from the 1960s and 70s, this exhibition presents a collection of never-before-seen works, many of which were produced during the artist’s summers overlooking the bay of La Spezia, Italy. Edith Schloss: Blue Italian Skies Above, Paintings from the 1960s and 70s will be on view from April 30-June 4 and will be accompanied by a catalogue with new scholarship by Jason Andrew. Public reception will be Saturday, April 30 3-5p.

Bold and at times brash, Schloss ingested the style and mentality of the Abstract Expressionists among which she was intrinsically linked. Her work spans painting, assemblage, collage, watercolor, and drawing and embraces the intimate, the primitive, and the profound. Guided by a delight in pure color and childlike curiosity, her playful imaginings of still lifes, laid over vibrant renderings of views out of open windows onto the Mediterranean sea, are a joyful celebration of common wonders. These works, manifest her new-found acquaintance with Giorgio Morandi, feature tchotchkes collected and arranged, animating the symbolism of each item: “I look at them and the weather before me,” she said, “and try to have clear ideas about it all and the world, and to put it down in the simplest color and line […] Abstract art? Figurative art? All art is a fusion of the real outside, and that which is inside us.”

Born in Germany, Schloss immigrated to New York City via London in 1942, where she became an observant member of the abstract expressionist movement and part of the thriving community of artists and intellectuals that found camaraderie in the neglected lofts of downtown. These included artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Jack Tworkov, Larry Rivers, composer John Cage, and poets John Asberry, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. She was among a minority of women artists in the New York School of the 1950s and 60s, and was featured in the historic 1961 exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1946, she married photographer Rudy Burckhardt and had a son Jacob Burckhardt. When the couple separated, Schloss “fled” New York for Rome. Expecting to stay on only a few months, she remained there a lifetime befriending Cy Twombly and mentoring Francesca Woodman. As a renegade expat, became a noted transatlantic correspondent of art criticism and continued to write and paint until she died in 2011 at the age of 92. 

In 2021, Schloss’s long-awaited, captivating posthumous memoir, The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly; Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and included in New York Times’ Top Books of 2021. The book received numerous favorable reviews: Alexandra Jacobs of The New York Times called it “A glowing jewel of a book,” Jed Perl for the New York Review of Books championed it for capturing “the heat of those times,” and Jamie Hood for Vulture wrote, “Schloss extends the reach of the ghostly archives of an artist, a scene, a moment.”

“I am pleased to celebrate the announcement of this representation and exhibition. Alexandre Gallery has long advocated for the likes of Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Helen Torr. Edith’s life and work will now be aligned with these legacies and recognized as essential in the course of American Modernism.” —Jacob Burckhardt, Estate of Edith Schloss

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Edith Schloss, “Spring Green,” 1967, Oil on canvas, 27 3/4 x 23 3/4 in (70.5 x 60.3 cm)

Edith Schloss was born in 1919 in Offenbach, Germany, and immigrated to New York City during World War II. In 1962 she moved to Italy, where she lived and worked until she died in 2011.

She studied at Shrewsbury Technical College, Shropshire, UK (1940), Boston School of Practical Arts, Boston, MA (1941), Art Students League, New York (with Harry Sternberg, Will Barnet and Morris Kantor) (1942-46), and the New School of Social Research, New York (1948).

Schloss actively exhibited at galleries throughout her lifetime, including Ashby Gallery, New York (1947), Workshop Gallery, New York (1959), Tanager Gallery, New York (1960), Galleria Aleph, Rome (1964), Galleria Il Segno, Rome (1968, 1974), Green Mountain Gallery, New York (1970, 1972, 1974), Ingber Gallery, New York (1974, 1975, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1987, 1989), Galleria II Gabbiano, La Spezia (1983, 1986), Galleria Giulia Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2008, 2009). In 2015, the first posthumous retrospective in New York was mounted at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, curated by Jason Andrew. Selected works from the artist’s Rignalla Series were exhibited at the Meredith Ward Fine Art in 2018.

Select institutional survey exhibitions include Klingspor-Museum, Offenbach, Germany (1990), The Keats-Shelley House, Rome (1993), Il Museo del Louvre, Rome (1997), St. Stephen’s School, Rome (2000), and Centro Arte Moderna e Contemporanea della Spezia (CAMEC) (2013).

Schloss’s work can be found in prominent private collections in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sydney, Rome, Milan, Ferrara and La Spezia. Her work is represented in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Keats-Shelley House, Rome; the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Wiesbaden; and the Offenbacher Stadtmuseum, Offenbach, Germany, to name a few. Her work has been reviewed by The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, among others.

Exhibition News: Elizabeth Murray at Gladstone Galley

Elizabeth Murray
October 30 – December 23, 2021
515 West 24th Street

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition with the Estate of Elizabeth Murray after announcing representation in the summer of 2020. This show presents a selection of the artist’s monumental canvases that helped define her career and singular place in art history.

I was in Elizabeth Murray's painting class at The School of Visual Art in New York City in the mid-70s... Elizabeth was exactly the mentor we sought, someone who by dint of both gender and disposition occupied an inside and outside position... Murray simply refused to submit to the position of illegitimacy that females experience in painting history. She just broke on in, seemingly taking what she needed from painting, and moving forward with it, like a shoplifter, or someone from inside the Trojan Horse.

— Amy Sillman on Elizabeth Murray in Texte Zur Kunst, 2021

Murray was born in Chicago in 1940 and had an early interest in making and studying art. While attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she was deeply influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne, which inspired her to pursue a degree in painting. Following her education, Murray moved to New York, where she developed a unique approach to artmaking and honed her intuitive ability to masterfully combine shapes and colors in both two- and three-dimensional realms. With a fascination for the plastic qualities of paint, she spent the decade of the 1960s experimenting with soft sculpture. Her compositions from the 1970s, in which rhythmic symbols play across thickly-layered rectangular planes of color, demonstrate Murray’s astuteness at crafting and understanding form, and highlight the artist’s hand during a period when Minimalism was the predominant movement in New York’s art scene. Her radical and trailblazing approach to art making evolved with the introduction of massive sized, multi-panel works in relief configurations. These complex canvases, which began in the early 1980s and continued until her death in 2007, challenged the very definition of painting. When her spirals and pregnant commas began to suggest recognizable forms—cups, tables, chairs—the narrative of the work was labeled "domestic." To this she replied, “Cézanne painted cups and saucers and apples, and no one assumed he spent a lot of time in the kitchen.”

With a pioneering practice that has bridged Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, Murray was instrumental in reawakening the power of painting, and her expansive body of work continues to influence and inspire artists, writers, and curators in long-lasting, profound ways.

Murray’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions around the world since her New York City debut in the 1972 Annual Exhibition, “Contemporary American Painting” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Solo exhibition highlights include: Camden Arts Centre, Camden, UK (2019); Anderson Collection at Stanford University, CA (2018); Musée d’art modern et contemporaine, Geneva (2016); BAM, Brooklyn, NY (2016); Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, CA (2014); Arts Club of Chicago (2009); University Art Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University, NY (2008); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS (1993); Newark Museum, NJ (1992); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1991); and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (1988). In 1987, a mid-career retrospective, “Elizabeth Murray: Paintings and Drawings,” organized by Sue Graze and Kathy Halbriech, originated at the Dallas Museum of Art, and later traveled to the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2005, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, opened a career retrospective, which traveled to Intitut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia Spain. Murray was recently the subject of two major museum exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, “Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves,” curated by Rebecca Matalon, which is currently on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art through January 9, 2022, and the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, “Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town,” curated by Robert Scalise.

Virtual Exhibition: Five Drawings opens for Janice Biala

Even at the height of her most gestural abstractions, Biala (1903-2000) held tight to traditional subject matter that inspired her—still lifes, interiors, landscapes, and portraiture. These subjects, rooted in old Europe, remained true for Biala throughout her career. Recently a portfolio of drawings was catalogued by the estate. Made available here for the first time in this online gallery curated by Jason Andrew, Curator/Director of the Estate of Janice Biala.

This selection features five large drawings by Biala depicting the interiors of her home at 8 rue Bertrand in Paris, France. These drawings, dating from 1965 to 1983, capture scenes within scenes, sometimes even combining two entirely different architectural points of view—a few even illustrate her own paintings in situ. They offer reference and perspective into Biala’s colorful and complex world—one that captures the sublime assimilation of the School of Paris and the New York School of abstract expressionism.

These are no easy interiors… her mark and gesture move them from the mere domestic to the dramatic.

— Jason Andrew

Historic Survey Opens at UB Art Galleries

Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town

June 12-October 3, 2021

UB Anderson Gallery
1 Martha Jackson Place
Buffalo, NY

This summer the University at Buffalo Art Galleries presents the first major posthumous exhibition of work by pioneering painter Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007). This survey presents a fresh look at important themes and motifs of Murray’s five-decade career.

Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town plots the artist’s career chronologically through paintings, drawings, and prints, which reveal how the early, never-before-exhibited works she made while based in the San Francisco Bay area and later in Buffalo relate to the mature painting style that earned her critical acclaim.

The impact of the two years Murray spent in Buffalo working and teaching at Rosary Hill College (now Daemen) has previously been a footnote in her legendary career and was treated as a two-year stopover during her move from San Francisco to New York City. In Buffalo, as Murray acknowledged herself, her work “changed radically,” setting her on a path to become the bold painter known for her wildly shaped canvases—a mix of abstraction and cartoonish figuration. This survey marks 55 years since Murray’s solo exhibition at the Tomac Gallery, an artist-run gallery in Buffalo, which was in operation from 1965 to 1969.

Exhibition News: Biala opens at PAAM (Provincetown)

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August 10-September 30, 2018

Opening reception: Friday, August 10, 8pm

Provincetown Art Association and Museum
460 Commercial Street
Provincetown, MA 02657

Provincetown Art Association and Museum presents Biala: Provincetown Summers: selected paintings and drawings. This historic exhibition is the first to focus entirely on the paintings and drawings by Janice Biala (1903-2000), which were created or inspired by her summers in Provincetown and on Cape Cod. The exhibition opens with a reception on Friday, August 10 at 8pm and will run through September 30 at Provincetown Art Association and Museum (460 Commercial Street, Provincetown, 508.487.1750 ext.17 / www.paam.org)

Organized and curated by Jason Andrew (Artist Estate Studio, LLC), the exhibition features twenty-seven paintings and twenty-three works on paper ranging in date from 1924 to 1985. Highlights include the earliest painting by the artist titled The Violin (c.1923-23) painted as an homage to her mentor and friend, Edwin Dickinson; Portrait of a Writer (Ford Madox Ford) (1938), who she met in 1930 and remained at his side until his death in 1939; The Beach (1958), a masterwork from the artist's most gestural period; a group of whimsical drawings of her grandnephew's first steps in Provincetown Bay; and Pilgrim Lake (1985), a pensive and contemplative painting that sublimely captures a layering of water, dunes, and the sky above. Works are on loan from the Estate of Janice Biala (courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York), as well as several major loans from private collections, The Art Collection of the Town of Provincetown, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Mr. Andrew will give a gallery talk on Tuesday, August 21 at 6pm
as part of the Fredi Schiff Levin Lectures.

An online catalogue with essay by curator Jason Andrew is available here by visiting www.janicebiala.org

Exhibition News: Edith Schloss at Meredith Ward Fine Art opens Feb 8

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Meredith Ward Fine Art is pleased to present Edith Schloss: By the Sea, an exhibition of 20 paintings and works on paper painted in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s (February 8 – March 30, 2018). This is the first exhibition of Schloss's work at the gallery and includes several paintings that will be on view for the first time. "Schloss's colorful and whimsical still lifes are a revelation," said Meredith Ward, President of the gallery. "They add an entirely new dimension to our understanding of figurative painting in the 1960s and 1970s." This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Estate of Edith Schloss and with the support of Artist Estate Studio, LLC.

Intrinsically linked to the milieu of postwar American art, Edith Schloss was an integral member of the Chelsea-New York art world, which flourished around the New York School and include photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt (whom she married in 1947) and the Jane Street Group around Nell Blaine.

In 1962, having separated from Burckhardt, Schloss with her young son in tow, left New York City for Italy. There, with Rome as her base, she sought out the legendary Giorgio Morandi, befriending him and drawing inspiration from his subtle and calculated still lifes. Among the first paintings Schloss produced in Italy were a series of still lifes that are the focus of this special exhibition. In these paintings, which border on the bittersweet, fragile, and naïve, Schloss lines up vases, teapots, flowers, and other objects and paints them against the Mediterranean Sea.
These whimsical works display vitality, inventiveness, and a distinctive painterly abstraction.

Schloss wrote of her work, "What I really do is what any painter worth his salt has always done, I abstract color and line from life around me, and make another life out of it." Among the highlights of the exhibition are two paintings titled Rignalla, which are being exhibited here for the first time. Over several summers, Schloss accompanied her lover, the composer/musician Alvin Curran, to Florence where he had a gig playing Dixieland Jazz at the Red Garter. From her room along the via di Rignalla, she painted several still lifes, which became mementos of her sojourns there.

About Edith Schloss
Edith Schloss (1919-2011) was born in Offenbach, Germany. As a young woman she traveled extensively in Europe. Working as an au pair in London during the Blitz, she was evacuated to the United States and landed in New York City. There, she met the political refugee Heinz Langerhans, who introduced her to Bertolt Brecht, and other intellectuals at The New School for Social Research.

From 1942 to 1946, she studied at the Art Students League with Will Barnet, Harry Sternberg, and Morris Kantor. In 1945, Schloss met Willem de Kooning through her friend, the painter Fairfield Porter. Around the same time, she became connected with a group of artists, poets and filmmakers in Chelsea, including Ellen and Walter Auerbach, Nell Blaine, Edwin Denby, and Rudy Burchkhardt. She joined the Jane Street Group, New York's first artist cooperative gallery, and in 1947 had her first one-person show at the Ashby Gallery.

Schloss married Rudy Burckhardt in 1947 and the couple spent summers with Fairfield Porter and his family in Maine. In 1962, she and Burkhardt separated, and Schloss moved to Italy. Schloss’s paintings have been shown in exhibitions in Rome and New York and her work is represented in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Keats-Shelley House, Rome; the Hessisches Landsmuseum, Wiesbaden; and the Offenbacher Stadtmuseum, Offenbach, Germany.

In 2015, a landmark retrospective of work by Edith Schloss was curated by Jason Andrew and held at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York. That exhibition marked the first show of the artist’s work in New York in twenty-five years. This exhibition at Meredith Ward, with a focused look on the works from the 1960s, continues the momentum and renewed interest in the artist’s work.

This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Estate of Edith Schloss and with the support of Artist Estate Studio, LLC. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online catalogue.

About Meredith Ward Fine Art
Meredith Ward Fine Art opened in 2004 specializing in American art from the 19th century to the present. The gallery is the exclusive representative of the estates of John Marin, Larry Day, Steve Wheeler, and Flora Crockett. Meredith Ward Fine Art is located at 44 East 74th Street in New York City and is open to the public Tuesday through Friday, 10am to 5:30pm and Saturday by appointment.

For more information or images, contact Julia Wilcox at 212-744-7306 or
info@meredithwardfineart.com | www.meredithwardfineart.com