News

Following the cancellation of the Brooklyn Heights house tour because the age of ubiquitous social media made homeowners uneasy, the Brooklyn Heights Association is presenting Showhouse at 32 Livingston Street from 11 am – 5 pm every day except Monday through November 5. Last entry is at 4 pm. Showhouse features the work of more than a dozen designers, along with products for the home, wallpaper, furniture, and fixtures, many of them created right here in the borough.

Ai Weiwei and Christine Berry of Berry Campbell gallery photographed together at the premiere of his new film, Human Flow.

Berry Campbell Gallery announces an exhibition of paintings by Syd Solomon to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Syd Solomon: Time and Tide will open on October 12 and run through November 11, 2017. This centenary exhibition precedes the artist’s traveling museum retrospective to open at Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York, in October 2018. The retrospective, which will also travel to the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, is accompanied by a 96-page exhibition catalogue with essays by Dr. Gail Levin, Michael Auping, Mike Solomon, and George Bolge. 

Syd Solomon (1917-2004), the gifted abstract-expressionist painter, was well recognized as an artist in the middle of the last century, especially in the early 1960s. He kept studios in East Hampton and Sarasota in Florida, spending time in both places during the course of the year. Solomon established an art presence in Sarasota, bringing in artists such as James Brooks and Larry Rivers to participate in the community there, as well as teaching at Sarasota’s Institute of Fine Art, the educational center he founded at New College. In the East Hamptons, he met Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline. His work, an attractive amalgam of bright colors and mostly organic shapes, feels as if it were heavily influenced by his experience of landscape. As a noted member of the abstract expressionists’ first generation, Solomon played a distinctive role as an artist who brought people together, at the same time developing a compelling style of his own. This style can’t be clearly tied to any particular colleague, but takes part in a playfully exuberant use of color only barely contained by the natural forms that they fill. Living as Solomon did in places of unusual beauty, it seems inevitable that his art would reflect his surroundings. 

Berry Campbell Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by SYD SOLOMON (1917-2004) to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Syd Solomon: Time and Tide will open on October 12 and run through November 11, 2017. This centenary exhibition precedes the artist’s traveling museum retrospective to open at Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York, in October 2018. The retrospective, which will also travel to the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, is accompanied by a 96-page exhibition catalogue with essays by Dr. Gail Levin, Michael Auping, Mike Solomon, and George Bolge. The opening reception for Syd Solomon: Time and Tide is Thursday, October 12 from 6 to 8 pm.

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Yvonne Thomas (1913-2009). The gallery will present nineteen paintings from 1950-1962. Berry Campbell is now representing the Estate of Yvonne Thomas. Throughout a career lasting over fifty years, Yvonne Thomas blended the intuitive freedom of Abstract Expressionism with the symbolic language of form and color.

It’s hard to categorize Larry Zox’s painting, though many have tried. In 1965, his work appeared in the exhibition “Shape and Structure,” organized by Frank Stella and Henry Geldzahler, which positioned the artist’s work amid hard-edge Color Field painting and Minimalism. A year later, Lawrence Alloway included Zox’s art in the show “Systemic Painting,” implying the work is best understood as an example of repetition and systemization, then supposedly the new “in” thing. This exhibition at Berry Campbell, however, demonstrated that Zox’s work betrays these categories. The eighteen pieces displayed (four small works on paper, fourteen on canvas) don’t have the reductive look of Minimalism—their colors don’t form a uniform field—and their structures can’t be regarded as systems. The repetitions that occur in them tend to be limited, giving them an odd inconclusiveness, and with that a peculiarly absurd, irksome quality. 

Abstract Expressionism is largely remembered as a movement defined by the paint-slinging, hard-drinking machismo of its poster boys Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. But the women who helped develop and push the style forward have largely fallen out of the art-historical spotlight, marginalized during their careers (and now in history books) as students, disciples, or wives of the their more-famous male counterparts rather than pioneers in their own right. (An exception is Helen Frankenthaler, whose transcendent oeuvre is often the only female practice referred to in scholarship and exhibitions around action painting.)

The John Jermain Memorial Library will present an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by East Hampton artist Susan Vecsey. This exhibition runs through September 4 with an opening reception July 29 from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.

New paintings by Mike Solomon embrace an unusual variety of formal ambiguity. Uniquely and unexpectedly reticent, his resin-constructed panels, most of which fall within easel scale, present the viewer with out of focus fields of color that are compelling while still offering resistance to optical navigation. Currently exhibited in "Mike Solomon: Immediate Splendor" at Berry Campbell in New York, these works insist instead on a viewer’s steady and indeterminate gaze. Objectively speaking, they may be said to cultivate a realization of Hans Hoffman’s push-and-pull that is frozen in time.