News

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce an focused exhibition of over sixteen paintings and works on paper by Raymond Hendler (1923-1998) from the 1970s.  The exhibition opens on March 17, 2016 and runs through April 16, 2016 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 17 from 6 to 8 pm.

Noah Becker Visits the New York Studio of Artist Jill Nathanson

With so much going on during Armory Week in Manhattan, you can be forgiven for not getting to the Charlotte Park survey on view at the Berry Campbell gallery in Chelsea, but it's really your loss.

With so much going on during Armory Week in Manhattan, you can be forgiven for not getting to the Charlotte Park survey on view at the Berry Campbell gallery in Chelsea, but it's really your loss.

Sure, the art fairs dotting the city as far north as the Park Avenue Armory and as far south as Tribeca had their moments. But just as the female artists of the past and present shined in those settings, Ms. Park's paintings from the years 1950 to 1985, work relatively unknown to the wider art market, demonstrate an artist at top form.

Redemption can be jubilant, as the current resonant solo show devoted to Charlotte Park (1918-2010) at Berry Campbell gallery in Chelsea proves. After decades in the shadow of her husband, James Brooks, Park steps forward from the Abstract Expressionist chorus and unleashes her singular strong voice, hitting all the top notes of color, gesture and scale with confident power. 

In the Hamptons of the 1950s and ’60s, there were two significant pairs of artists working in Abstract Expressionism. The two couples were also friends. One set you know: Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. The other you might not: James Brooks (1906–1992) and Charlotte Park (1918–2010).

Brooks and Park were both artists when they met in Washington, D.C., during World War II. They moved to New York together in 1945 and forged a fast friendship with Pollock and Krasner, renting studio space from them in the city and eventually following their lead to resettle on Long Island. “These artists were forging a new aesthetic,” Helen Harrison of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center has said, “and only they understood what they were doing, so there was this sense of camaraderie.”

The exhibition, titled “Women of Abstract Expressionism”, has been organized by DAM’s curator of modern art Gwen Chanzit and consists of 51 paintings by 12 groundbreaking women artists who contributed to Abstract Expressionism; the large-scale, imageless painting style that firmly put New York City on the avant-garde art map in the 1940s and 50s. The artists in the exhibition include Mary Abbott, Jay DeFeo, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Judith Godwin, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Deborah Remington and Ethel Schwabacher.

“Noah Becker Presents… Something” is a New Yorker’s show. As children of glam, gold, glitter and garbage, much of the 26 artworks dance at the shiny-dusty feet of Andy Warhol, the city’s veritable king of things. These could easily turn trite as riffs on the classics of Pop and abstraction, mixed media and montage; however, curator Noah Becker has thoughtfully gathered the artists by their more subtle connections of something or another.

Looking back to Miami Art Week (which took place the first week of December), one would have thought the perpetual rainstorms would have dampened the spirits of attendees. However, practically every art gallery that I spoke with said the inclement weather had absolutely no effect on the reported record sales.

The overwhelming majority of artworks on view in Something are paintings. The works evoke illusory and imaginative revisions of reality, manifesting curator Noah Becker’s vision to highlight playful ambiguity in contemporary art trends. Becker explains about the title, Something: “It’s a bit Warholian to use a word like that as a starting point…for an epic group show. Words are pop art due to words being universal symbols. The idea of things being universal and understood instantly…how does one express it in their art?”