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From the moment I walked into the solo show “Frank Wimberley” at Berry Campbell in Chelsea, I became thoroughly engaged with Wimberley’s textural paintings. The works convey an exhilarating sense of freedom as well as a consistent vision: one major painting after another, evidencing some of the most original and varied paint handling I’ve seen.

On view through July 3, 2019, “Frank Wimberley” is a near survey and presents 20 paintings that roam across the decades (including recent works). Now 92 years old, Wimberley proves that he is still vibrant and active as an artist. He evolved as a pure painter, largely eschewing overt sociopolitical themes in his work and became exemplary of American abstraction’s mainstream; an expressionist responding to free association and guided solely by his own taste and intuition.

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce the exclusive representation of the Estate of Edward Zutrau (1922-1993). Exhibition forthcoming in 2020.

View Works by Edward Zutrau

EDWARD ZUTRAU (1922–1993)

An artist for whom life and art were intertwined, Edward Zutrau worked with dedication, energy, and intensity throughout a long career—lasting from the 1940s through the early 1990s. While he resided mostly in Brooklyn and Manhattan, his travels had an important impact on his creative development, especially the five years he spent in Japan, where his art received a significant amount of appreciation and recognition. Blending precepts of the New York School with a strong physicality, Zutrau’s works draw the viewer into both feeling and contemplation. His art was admired by his close friend Betty Parsons, who held three solo shows of his paintings at her renowned New York gallery from 1972 to 1980. As an art teacher, Zutrau inspired his many students with a love of materials and art as a means of self-expression rather than of technical virtuosity. He upheld the high ideals he conveyed in his teaching in his own work, which was always idea-driven, representing his constant search for clarity and concision.

More than a century ago, Wassily Kandinsky asked whether purely abstract art could ever achieve the same emotional effect as music. Since the 1950s, Frank Wimberley has been proving that it can, by simply doing it—composing images that pull the human mind and heart along on a journey of feeling, same as a symphony might. One year ago, Berry Campbell gallery in New York announced it had signed Wimberley to the roster of artists the gallery represents. Their highly anticipated first solo exhibition of his work just opened on 30 May. Featuring more than 30 paintings spanning from the early days of his career to works created just this year, the museum quality exhibition breathes fresh life into the landscape of contemporary American abstraction. In fact, the emotional content of these paintings is so condensed it is frankly difficult to experience the whole exhibition in one visit. Wimberley starts each painting with what he calls an “attack”—an instinctive incursion into the blankness. That first, intuitive confrontation with the unknown territory of the surface leaves behind a known quantity: a mark. Like a mystical boat carrying the rider across a spiritual river into the netherworld, that first mark guides Wimberley along through the composition, collaborating with him on a series of choices that lead the picture to its unimaginable, yet inescapable aesthetic conclusions. Imagine a jazz trio: the drummer strikes the snare drum; the keyboard player riffs on that sound; the horn player follows suit; a tempo emerges; finally, the improvisation takes on a life of its own and pulls the players along till it plays itself out. This is how Wimberley paints. Like a listener at a jazz concert, a viewer at this Wimberley exhibition may be best served by an attitude of openness verging on surrender. Pick a starting point and let your eye establish its own tempo. The composition will carry you along.

A solo show of work by Frank Wimberley will open today at the Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and continue through July 3. Known since the 1960s for his dynamic, multilayered abstract paintings, Mr. Wimberley, who lives in Sag Harbor, takes the theme of each painting from the first stroke he lays down and follows it to its conclusion, not unlike improvisation in jazz.

We are preparing for our Frank Wimberley exhibition, opening on May 30, 2019. Please read our online catalogue to learn more about the artist and his career.

Frank Wimberley
May 30 - July 3, 2019

Opening Reception
May 30, 2019
6-8 PM