Color Field Revisited    Sep 5 - Nov 1, 2008

GARY SNYDER / Project Space
250 WEST 26 STREET, NEW YORK, NY, 10001
T : 212 929 1351 WWW. GARYSNYDERART.COM

Gary Snyder/Project Space opens the fall 2008 season with Color Field Revisited, an exhibition which features five painters active in American Color Field painting in the late 1950s and 1960s. Three of the artists, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring, and Albert Stadler exhibited in the important Post- Painterly Abstraction exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, curated by Clement Greenberg. Leon Berkowitz was a fellow Washington Color School painter along with Downing and Mehring, and New York based Vivian Springford was more closely associated with Sam Francis and Walasse Ting.

Color Field painting is seen as both a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, as embodied by the thickly painted gestural abstraction of Willem de Kooning, and a continuation of the more nuanced, thinly painted surfaces emanating from Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Paint is often soaked or stained into the canvas, and large areas of pure color create a more ethereal aesthetic experience.

Color Field painting is being reconsidered as art of the 1960s continues to be studied more carefully. The exhibition “Color as Field: American Painting 1950 – 1975”, was recently at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and there has been an explosion in the art market for artists such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler.

This exhibition, Color Field Revisited, examines the work of five painters well-respected and exhibited in the 1960s who are now getting more attention and study. Gary Snyder is pleased to continue a tradition of revisionist art history by presenting this important exhibition.

The exhibition opens September 5th and closes November 1st. Gary Snyder/Project Space is open Tuesday – Saturday 11 – 6 PM. For further information please email sunny@garysnyderart.com, call 212 929 1351, or visit our website www.garysnyderart.com.