Project Space will complement Gary Snyder’s east side townhouse where Snyder works as a private art dealer and consultant focusing on modern American art rooted in the 1920s through the 1960s.

“Since closing my gallery at 601 West 29th Street in 2003, I have enjoyed the flexibility and freedom of being a private art dealer”, says Snyder, “but I have missed having a space to present exhibitions. The Project Space will allow me to present to the public important bodies of historically rooted art”.

Snyder’s first year of programming will focus on Hard-Edge Abstraction circa 1955–1975. The first show (October 4—December 1, 2007) features Thomas Downing (1928–1985), who with Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis established a “Washington School” known for combining the influence of Morris Louis’s staining of unprimed canvas with a new interest in geometry. Downing was in many of the seminal exhibitions of the 1960s, including “Post Painterly Abstraction”, LACMA 1964, “The Responsive Eye”, MOMA 1965, and “Systemic Painting” at the Guggenheim in 1966. His work was recently featured in the “Optic Nerve” exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with color plates of the six large paintings featured in the show, and an essay by Sarah Rich, associate professor of art history at Pennsylvania State University, who has written extensively on cold war-era abstract painting (her review of the “Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s” exhibition was the cover feature in the June “Artforum”).

Complementing the Downing show will be an exhibition in December and January, focusing on the Washington School and including works by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring, Paul Reed and Leon Berkowitz.

In February 2008, the Project Space will present an exhibition of paintings from the 1970s by Tadaaki Kuwayama, an artist who showed his minimal abstractions along with Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly at the Green Gallery in 1963.

This will be Snyder’s fourth exhibition space since 1991 in New York City. First opening in Soho, then at 20 West 57th Street, and then in Chelsea at 601 West 29th Street, Snyder has forged a reputation for his historically rooted and revisionist exhibitions of American modernism.

Snyder has helped put together many important collections, including the J. Donald Nichols collection of American Abstract Art of the 1930s and 1940s (exhibited in 1998 at Wake Forest University), and the Jeffrey and Linda Zissu collection of Abstract Expressionism, which was auctioned by Sotheby’s in a single owner sale in 2006. He continues to assist clients who are building collections in Early American Modernism, American Abstraction of the 1930s and 1940s, Abstract Expressionism, and Hard Edge Abstraction circa 1955–1975.

Gary Snyder/Project Space will be open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm

For further information visit garysnyderart.com, or call 212 929 1351, or contact the Director of Gary Snyder/Project Space, Jason Silva, at jason@garysnyderart.com.