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Berry-Hill Galleries is pleased to announce Cleve Gray: The Seventies, an exhibition comprised of paintings from 1971-1979, a seminal period in the artist's oeuvre during which his signature gestural style emerged. The exhibition opens Friday, April 20th and runs through Saturday, May 12, 2001. In a 1977 exhibition catalogue published by the Albright Knox Gallery for a traveling exhibition entitled Cleve Gray 1966-1977, Robert T. Buck, Jr. wrote in his foreword "Cleve Gray's 70's work may be seen to represent a kind of break-through in which an expressionistic painter, originally inspired by cubism, combines the legacy of American painting of the '50's with a remarkable sense of color and space that bears no relationship to the other work of the much touted, so-called color painters. The gestural nucleus, which is the dominant motif of Gray's work, is simultaneously microcosm and macrocosm, oriental and of New York. It symbolizes in a direct way the tremendous breadth of experience and well informed intellect which causes Gray to stand apart." Cleve Gray began his artistic career in the late 1940's. Inspired by Cubism after years of study in Europe with Andre Lhote and Jacques Villon, Cleve returned to the United States when the American Abstract Expressionist movement was sweeping the New York art scene. Always an individualist, he pursued a personal course toward his own remarkable abstraction which fuses the foundation of Cubism with the energy and restraint of Far Eastern Art. During the early 70's, Cleve Gray was commissioned by the Neuberger Museum of Art to create a piece for the opening of the museum. The result was Threnody, a monumental mural comprised of fourteen 20 x 20 foot canvases. Threnody, a memorial for those who died in the Vietnam War, is said to be the largest group of abstract paintings ever created for any public space. Throughout his career, Cleve Gray's work has been the subject of museum exhibitions and can be found in public and private collections throughout the United States. In 1998 a two-year traveling retrospective exhibition entitled Cleve Gray: Painter, A Quarter of A Century opened at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio traveled to the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, to the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York and to the William Benton Museum in Storrs, Connecticut. The exhibition spanned twenty-five years of painting highlighting the artist's passion with the expression of line, his ongoing exploration of the calligraphic line and the dynamics of color. For further reading on Cleve Gray, the monograph Cleve Gray by Nicholas Fox Weber (Harry N. Abrams) is currently available. |
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