Ann Purcell

June 14 - October 26, 2018
Luther W. Brady Art Gallery
The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design
The George Washington University

DC artists paint the town red — and every color of the rainbow

The Washington Color School encompasses the DC artists in the 1950s and 1960s who focused on Color Field painting, a style of abstract painting that typically includes blocks of solid color. Many of these artists were associated with what is now known as George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. The Luther W. Brady Art Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in the Corcoran’s Flagg Building celebrates the history of both the Washington Color School and the Corcoran.

'Full Circle: Hue and Saturation in the Washington Color School'

The first show at the Luther W. Brady Gallery’s new, larger quarters in the former Corcoran Gallery draws mostly from George Washington University’s own collection, but it’s broadened by savvy borrowings. This impressive selection of color-field painting includes many mid-20th-century Washingtonians, and encompasses out-of-towners and recent work. Pictures by such noted D.C. colorists as Gene Davis and Anne Truitt contrast vivid colors with hard-edge geometry. Less solemn and newly painted is a 2017 canvas by New York’s Larry Poons, a onetime minimalist buoyantly reborn as an expressionist. Through Oct. 25 at George Washington University Luther W. Brady Gallery, Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, 500 17th St. NW. 202-994-1525.
www2.gwu.edu/~bradyart/brady/exhibitions.html.

The paintings of Ann Purcell are a tour de force of abstract mechanics. At Chelsea’s Berry Campbell gallery, an impressive selection from her “Caravan Series” of the late 1970s and early 1980s is now on view. 

Thank you Ann Purcell for a wonderful opening event! Thank you everyone for joining us! 
Watch the video to see us celebrating!

Modernist with a vengeance, the paintings in Ann Purcell’s “Caravan Series” range from five-to-six-feet-high or -wide, an expanse an energetic Abstract Expressionist could cover with one step and a sweeping arm.

Yet Purcell, who was born in Washington, D.C., in 1941, was too young to be part of the New York School artists’ postwar pas de deux with their canvases. Rather than de Kooning’s voluptuous strokes or Pollock’s animated splatters, Purcell’s early-1980s imagery has a fractured grace that reverberates with that era’s garish excesses. It was a time not unlike our own—Ronald Reagan was in the White House and the boorish extravagances of Wall Street’s budding Masters of the Universe were chalked up to its being “Morning in America,” after the drip-drip-drip revelations of Watergate in the first half of the ’70s and Jimmy Carter’s dithering in the second.

Start the New Year off right by checking out our top picks for gallery shows opening in New York City. Galleries in Chelsea, Downtown and Brooklyn showcasing painting, sculpture, collage, photography and work that blends genres. The shows consider dualities of form, inspiration from architecture, new directions in portraiture and the challenges of the past year. Below, check out our selection of highlights for the NYC gallery scene through January 7, 2018.

When Ann Purcell was a young painter and art teacher in Washington, D.C., she came to know two artists she now considers mentors—Gene Davis, famed for his vertical stripes, and Jacob Kainen, who influenced generations of artists with his wisdom, independence and work ethic. Those two, in their prime years, had solved their own formal problems during the heyday of America’s most influential critic—the legendary Clement Greenberg. Much later, Purcell had a five-hour encounter with Greenberg, a studio visit when the man pointed to “Lascaux,” her first so-called “Caravan,” and said, “Do more of these.” 

Berry Campbell Gallery is pleased to announce a special exhibition of paintings from the 1980s by Ann Purcell from January 4 through February 3, 2018. For Ann Purcell, a nationally recognized artist, whose abstract work is represented in museums across the United States, process is a critical factor. The gestural and alive qualities of her paintings, collages, and works on paper reflect her use of process as a means of expression and exploration, as she works within tensions of paradox, ambiguity, duality, and contradiction.

Ann Purcell's Hopscotch #1 (1978) will be featured in the group show “Art in the Making: A New Adaption” exhibiting in the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at George Washington University. Purcell's painting will be displayed alongside work by Lee Bontecou, Helen Frankenthaler, Charles Pollock, Jackson Pollock, Gene Davis, Georgia Deal, Andrew Hudson, Jules Olitski, Dennis O’Neil and Berthold Josef Schmutzhart. 

The exhibition is on view to the public from Wednesday, May 6, 2015 to Friday, July 17, 2015