News

BERRY CAMPBELL is pleased to announce the representation of New York-based painter, SUSAN VECSEY.  Vecsey is widely held in both public and private collections and most recently, Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, acquired White Main Beach for their permanent collection.  

We’re starting downtown in Chelsea at Berry Campbell, whose latest show, Raymond Hendler: Swinging Heart, is set to open this Thursday. The show will display the abstract expressionist works ofRaymond Hedler (American, 1923-1998) created between 1957 and 1964.The artist began his career in Paris as early as 1949, playing a key role in the Abstract Expressionist movement that took hold in both Paris and across the ocean in the avant-garde artistic circles of New York.

In the 1960s they called it “color-field painting” and after 1970, it was increasingly called “modernism,” by which time it attracted less attention.  But the artists kept at it. Now, to judge from four overlapping exhibitions of this later period, there may be fresh interest in what they did.  “Walter Darby Bannard: Dragon Water,” at Berry Campbell, is up through March 15.  Although Bannard was known in the early ‘60s for minimalist paintings, by the 1970s he had shifted to modernism, reveling in its succulent surfaces and offbeat colors.  This show is all from the 70s.  As is evident from “Pakistani,” he could convey a swinging, curtain-like motion with colors both radiant and restrained: mauve, purple, pale-to-vibrant orange and pale, almost citric lime-yellow. PIRI HALASZ

The Frank and Gertrude Kaiser Art Gallery at Molloy College is proud to partner with Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea to exhibit Edwin Ruda: The Band Paintings, including paintings and works on paper from 1969 to 1972. Through the efforts and generosity of Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, the Kaiser Art Gallery has been fortunate enough to travel the Ruda exhibition.

Walter Darby Bannard is a hedonist, and proud of it. He believes that the role of art is to give pleasure. It’s not meant to be an intellectual exercise, or political propaganda, or even an illustration of something that it’s not (though he has plenty of room in his lexicon for representational painters, past and present, whose work pleasures the eye, regardless of what else it may or may not do).

February 25, 2014, New York, New York -- Edwin Ruda passed away at age 91.   Ruda was born in New York City in 1922 and grew up in the East Bronx.  He graduated from Cornell University in 1947, having interrupted his studies to enlist in the navy during World War II.  In 1949 he received a Master of Arts from Columbia University and spent the following decade studying in Mexico City, teaching at the University of Texas, and completing a Master of Fine Arts at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Washington Art Matters II:  1940s-1980s, opened Saturday, Jan. 25 through Sunday, March 16, is a second opportunity to revisit Washington DC’s most celebrated artists of the 20^th century.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, February 11, 2014 – Berry Campbell is pleased to announce, Walter Darby Bannard: Dragon Water, featuring sixteen paintings from the 1970s. Bannard, a leader in the development of Color Field Painting in the late 1950s, has been committed to color-based and expressionist abstraction for over five decades. During his undergraduate years at Princeton University, he joined fellow students, the painter Frank Stella and the critic and art historian Michael Fried, in conversations that expanded aesthetic definitions and led to an emphasis on opticality as the defining feature of pictorial art.

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce Edwin Ruda: The Band Paintings, including sixteen paintings and works on paper from 1969 to 1972.

Unafraid to step beyond stylistic boundaries, Edwin Ruda consistently probed the incongruities and connections between minimalism and the geometric and lyrical modes of abstraction.  Ruda’s “band” paintings embody his efforts to reconcile these two divergent forms. The result is an elegant, radiant body of work. Loosening the flow of his paint, Ruda introduced pure and translucent bands of colors that are rarely part of minimalist statements.  He then worked through the resulting contradictions without allowing structure or formlessness to dominate.

Joining Forces

A true "boomerang," Ken Greenleaf grew up in Damariscotta and returned to Maine after having lived in New York for 20 years.  He has had solo and group shows at various New York galleries, including Tibor de Nagy, and in 1994 participated in a two-person show at the Farnsworth Art Museum with Dozier Bell, who is now his wife.