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We are preparing for our John Opper exhibition opening on February 8, 2018. Please read our online catalogue to learn more about the artist and his career.

Thank you Ann Purcell for a wonderful opening event! Thank you everyone for joining us! 
Watch the video to see us celebrating!

Modernist with a vengeance, the paintings in Ann Purcell’s “Caravan Series” range from five-to-six-feet-high or -wide, an expanse an energetic Abstract Expressionist could cover with one step and a sweeping arm.

Yet Purcell, who was born in Washington, D.C., in 1941, was too young to be part of the New York School artists’ postwar pas de deux with their canvases. Rather than de Kooning’s voluptuous strokes or Pollock’s animated splatters, Purcell’s early-1980s imagery has a fractured grace that reverberates with that era’s garish excesses. It was a time not unlike our own—Ronald Reagan was in the White House and the boorish extravagances of Wall Street’s budding Masters of the Universe were chalked up to its being “Morning in America,” after the drip-drip-drip revelations of Watergate in the first half of the ’70s and Jimmy Carter’s dithering in the second.

An Abstract Expressionist painter, Syd Solomon, held important roles in the art communities of Sarasota, Florida, and East Hampton, New York. He began painting in high school in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, where he was an All-American football player. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1935 to 1938. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the war effort. He was assigned to the 924th Engineer Aviation Regiment of the US Army where he was able to hone his artistic skills by creating camouflage from the air, which protected the airfields being built by the battalion.

With postcard vistas of Central Park, a Manhattan apartment blends classic architecture with cosmopolitan style. Chair in a Fox Linton linen, Quintus; lamp, Visual Comfort; painting, Susan Vecsey. | Photo: Simon Upton; Interior Design: Tammy Connor

Start the New Year off right by checking out our top picks for gallery shows opening in New York City. Galleries in Chelsea, Downtown and Brooklyn showcasing painting, sculpture, collage, photography and work that blends genres. The shows consider dualities of form, inspiration from architecture, new directions in portraiture and the challenges of the past year. Below, check out our selection of highlights for the NYC gallery scene through January 7, 2018.

When Ann Purcell was a young painter and art teacher in Washington, D.C., she came to know two artists she now considers mentors—Gene Davis, famed for his vertical stripes, and Jacob Kainen, who influenced generations of artists with his wisdom, independence and work ethic. Those two, in their prime years, had solved their own formal problems during the heyday of America’s most influential critic—the legendary Clement Greenberg. Much later, Purcell had a five-hour encounter with Greenberg, a studio visit when the man pointed to “Lascaux,” her first so-called “Caravan,” and said, “Do more of these.” 

Berry Campbell Gallery is pleased to announce a special exhibition of paintings from the 1980s by Ann Purcell from January 4 through February 3, 2018. For Ann Purcell, a nationally recognized artist, whose abstract work is represented in museums across the United States, process is a critical factor. The gestural and alive qualities of her paintings, collages, and works on paper reflect her use of process as a means of expression and exploration, as she works within tensions of paradox, ambiguity, duality, and contradiction.

NEW YORK, NY -- On view through December 22, 2017 at Berry Campbell Gallery is “Albert Stadler: Studies in Color.” This exhibition presents twenty-one works dated from 1973-1986. “Studies in Color” is the second one-person show of Stadler’s paintings held at Berry Campbell; the first, which ran from September 11 through October 11, 2014, featured Stadler’s works from the 1960s. The two shows juxtaposed show an evolution in technique and palette range with a constant devotion to color.

On my last visit to Chelsea, a must-see was the Syd Solomon show at the Berry Campbell gallery. Surveying all the paintings in this show, one can quickly see that Syd Solomon, an abstract painter who from 1959 and for the next thirty-five years split his time between Sarasota and the Hamptons, lived to paint. These works, from the ’70s and ’80s, today still look fresh and energetic; the aerosol enamel and acrylic paint he used is vibrant. The paintings are composed of exuberant swaths of color, his northern and southern coastal imagery melding together, collage-like. In “Morning Light Signs” the flotsam and jetsam of pink and orange recede and return to the foreground as if floating. There is an excitement to Solomon’s abstraction, as in “Lunareach,” where ribbons of orange and yellow tangle in an infinite darkened distance.