An exhibition of new paintings by Columbia University School of the Arts Visual Arts Program Chair Gregory Amenoff will open at Alexandre Gallery in New York October 14. The show, "At All Hours: New Paintings," will include sixteen medium and small-scaled oil on wood panel works completed over the past two years at Amenoff’s Ulster County, New York studio. It marks the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery.
For over thirty years Amenoff has pursued his vision of intense, romantic, physical, and densely woven semi-abstract landscape paintings based on observation and personal interpretation of the natural world. His paintings capture the sublime feeling of awe before nature and evoke the varied emotional power of the viewer’s experience there. Amenoff’s paintings seldom describe specific observed sites; instead they describe the psychic possibilities and the realities of felt places. The viewpoint is often of an implied figure looking into a highly imagined world. Among the titles for the new paintings are Angel, At All Hours, Bocage, Ribbonfall and Where We Go To Get Lost.
One recurring motif in Amenoff’s new paintings is a lyrical calligraphic leafed vine. The vine is painted in varying forms and colors against different grounds – in some panels moving from dark to light, and in others from light to dark. The compositions are often divided between opposites – bright yellow light and deep celestial blue, or lush fertile green against arid brown or salt white. One critic has said of Amenoff’s recent work, “Color and contrasts of light and dark are pumped up to melodramatic effect. It’s as though you were seeing through the eyes of someone having a transcendental revelation .... Mr. Amenoff lays on color in generous, brushy strokes, grounding cosmic ecstasy in viscous paint.” (Ken Johnson, The New York Times, October 31, 2008).
Gregory Amenoff (b. 1948) lives and works in New York and Ulster County. He has taught at Columbia University School of the Arts for the past sixteen years, where he is Eve and Herman Gelman Chair of the Visual Arts Program. He is the recipient of numerous awards from organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and Tiffany Foundation. He has had over fifty one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in the permanent collections of museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He served as President of the National Academy of Design (2001-05). He is a founding member of the Cue Art Foundation where he serves on its board.
"At All Hours: New Paintings" will be on view at Alexandre Gallery (Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue, 13th Floor) through November 27. There will be an opening reception and 57th Street Open House October 14, 5:30-7:30 pm.
