News

Mise en Scène Design presents

DEEP FOCUS

A series of cinematic inspirations

Maine-based American artist Ken Greenleaf in his latest body of works explores the dynamics of human perception by experimenting with the relationships between planes, edges and colors. The following interview is conducted with the artist by COCA Art Media regarding the exhibition of Ken Greenleaf’s recent work at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, from November 20, 2014, to January 3, 2015.

The exhibition’s modesty and its adherence to an aesthetic that the current art world has largely consigned to the files of “Been there, done that” shouldn’t be off-putting. Mr. Greenleaf’s recent work radiates sincerity, and not the cheap, sentimental kind. He means what he says in these gritty drawings and carefully calibrated paintings, and the show is worth seeing.

One of Miami Art Week's youngest fairs but also one of it most highly sought out, Miami Project 2014 returns with a tightly curated selection of 70 American galleries and a particular focus on contemporary and mixed-media work.

For artnet's 25th anniversary, the company and 100 friends headed to the rooftop of the Gramercy Park Hotel for a festive night with DJ Premier as MC. The legendary rap producer, DJ, and one half of duo, Gang Starr, energized the crowd with tracks from pop stars Beyoncé to The Human League.

Featuring speaker Susan Vecsey

When the adventure fabulist novel, King Solomon’s Mines, was written in 1885 by H. Rider Haggard, it was promoted in London as “The Most Amazing Book Ever Written,” and it became an immediate best seller. Once the contents at The Solomon Archive become known through a documentary film we are producing about my parents, Syd and Annie Solomon, I’m hoping that a similar response may occur. Their story is certainly an amazing one.

Younger collectors are expected to descend on the city.

“We’re talking under 30 years old,” said Christine Berry of Berry Campbell gallery in New York. “Their money is across the board. It’s self made; it’s inherited; it’s finance. It’s a new generation of collectors.”

While I was in New York to see the Leonard Lauder collection of Cubism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (it actually surpasses its lofty billing), I saw a pair of shows by Mainers Ken Greenleaf and Dan Mills.

While the Nobleboro-based Greenleaf had a notable early New York City career as a sculptor and has shown at Caldbeck and Aucocisco galleries in Maine, more Mainers probably know him as a serious and insightful art critic. An exhibition of his paintings, drawings and collages is now on view at Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea.

In an entirely different palette, Susan Vecsey’s “White Main Beach,” East Hampton, 2012, is a scene familiar to anyone who braves the ocean beach on an overcast winter’s day. Bathed in whites, with violet tints in the sky and greenish tints in the sand, Vecsey creates a composition that both goes in toward a vanishing point and comes back at you, through the movement in the clouds. The whole inward/outward motion then takes a vertical and horizontal direction from the crosshatching of the linen, on which White Beach, East Hampton is painted.