Dorothea Tanning, Zabriskie Gallery, New York - Flower Paintings

Dorothea Tanning: Flower Paintings
Zabriskie Gallery, New York
November 23, 1999 - January 15, 2000

Zabriskie Gallery presents new oil paintings by DOROTHEA TANNING. The exhibition features works from the series Flowers, which are the subject of the recently published book, Another Language of Flowers.

In 1998, Dorothea Tanning painted twelve imaginary blooms on twelve canvases - one for each month. Zabriskie Gallery will highlight eight of these paintings. These large and brilliantly conceived canvases once again reveal the artist's life-long dedication to the romantic-erotic imagination. Art critic, Donald Kuspit wrote, "[Tanning] is heir to the surrealist magic, the keeper of its uncompromising flame. Still urgently in pursuit of the marvelous, she comes up with pictures that are so purely fantasy that they can be read as allegorical personifications of the unconscious itself."

The book, Another Language of Flowers, published in 1999 by George Braziller, Inc. Publishers, features the twelve paintings with poems by twelve contemporary poets who have each chosen a flower and given it its voice, creating a collaboration between artist and poets resulting in a new "language of flowers." The twelve poets are: James Merrill, Harry Mathews, Rosanna Warren, Debora Gregor, Adrienne Rich, Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard, J.D. McClatchy, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, Stephen Yenser, and Brenda Shaughnessy.

DOROTHEA TANNING was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1910. She has lived and worked in Chicago, Arizona, New York and for twenty-eight years in France. In addition to her work as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and designer of sets and costumes for ballet and theater in New York, London, and Paris, she has published essays, poems, and a memoir, Birthday. Since her return from France in 1979 she has lived in New York City where she continues to paint and write.

Dorothea Tanning's works are in numerous public collections including The Tate Gallery, London; The Georges Pompidou Center, Paris; the Menil Collection, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Most recently, a number of Dorothea Tanning's works were seen in the exhibition, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, The Nesuhi Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi Collections, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

ZABRISKIE GALLERY
41 East 57 Street, New York, NY 10022
www.zabriskiegallery.com