Miyoko Ito (1918 - 1983): Paintings, Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

Miyoko Ito (1918 - 1983): Paintings

Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

November 7 - December 19, 2014

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by MIYOKO ITO (1918-1983). This is Ito’s second New York solo exhibition since 1978. Miyoko Ito was born to Japanese parents in Berkeley, CA in 1918. She studied art at the University of California at Berkeley for a short time until she was imprisoned in a Japanese-American camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ito continued her education in prison and afterwards went to Smith College. After college, she was given a scholarship to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in Chicago that Ito's career as an artist flourished; exploring cubism and latent abstraction in her works. Miyoko Ito stayed in Chicago until her death in 1983.

The exhibition focuses on Miyoko Ito’s paintings from the 1960’s to 1970’s. These paintings with their subtle mix of abstraction and figuration share the spirit of Matisse’s “Piano Lesson,” the linearity of Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” paintings and Paul Klee’s “ability to imbue his images with an inner life that is compelling and magical,” yet Ito’s paintings retain an obstinate independence and original vision that were an inspiration and bridge for generations of abstract and imagist artists in Chicago.

In his essay for the exhibition, Len Klekner says, “Ito’s paintings are in the main abstract, creating and maintaining an alternative universe as a whole distinctly set off from the world we inhabit. But many of her forms are allusive, suggestive of bits and pieces of bodies and the furnishings of our everyday lives. These elements are never resolved enough to overpower the imaginative arenas of her abstract fields. But they are suggestive enough, and perhaps even jarring enough, to lend another level of frisson to her works. Her forms are also often playful, quirky, and even goofy-to the point of contrasting markedly with the quiet authority of her sensitive backgrounds and resonant facture.”

Miyoko Ito’s work has been included in all major surveys of Chicago art including the exhibition “Art in Chicago 1945-1995.” A retrospective of her work was held at The Rennaisance Society at The University of Chicago in 1980. Ito was also included in the Whitney Biennial in 1975, and the Carnegie Insititute’s “International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting.” Her work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The National Academy of Design, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

ADAM BAUMGOLD

60 East 66th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.adambaumgoldgallery.com

Artist Maryan, Adam Baumgold Gallery, NYC - Works from the 60s

Maryan: Works from the 60s

Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

September 5 — October 12, 2002

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents the exhibition "Maryan:Works from the 60's". The artist's first New York solo show in twelve years will focus on paintings, works on paper and linoleum cuts that Maryan (1927-1977) executed after he moved to New York in 1962.

Born Pinchas Burstein in 1927 in Poland, Maryan and his family were arrested in 1939 and placed in various labor and concentration camps. When the Russians liberated the camps in 1945, Maryan had lost a leg but survived. None of his family lived. Maryan was 18. After the war, Maryan studied art in Jerusalem and moved to Paris in 1950 where he studied art again at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and established his reputation in Europe before moving to New York.

The "Personnages" work from the 1960's show solitary figures in often brutal, boisterous, aggressive, and theatrical poses that are always executed with heightened colors, deft draftsmanship and a formal elegance. The paintings and drawings depict figures caught in the comedy of the human condition somewhere between Beckett's "Endgame," Commedia del Arte characters, Kafka and Goya.

The exhibition features a large painting "Personnage," 1962, that shows the twisted upper torso of a man in military uniform - fingers bloody, tongue skewered defiantly to the side of his mouth with two solitary red chess pieces on either side of his body. A series of eight linoleum cuts from 1962 has costumed, seated figures with part comical, part maniacal facial expressions and wildly gesticulating hand movements. These works are done with a bold and crisp line that is the organizing force in all the drawings and works on paper in the exhibition.

Maryan's work was linked at times to movements such as CoBrA, Nouvelle Figuration, and other artists, among them Peter Saul, Philip Guston, and H.C. Westermann, as well as the Chicago Imagists, Jim Nutt and Ed Paschke, but the very personal nature of his oeuvre makes it unique and original. That Maryan was an artist provided him with the means to address his life experiences on his own terms - his "Truth Paintings," as he called them, are "autobiographical" - "I will be myself in any color I put on the canvas."

Maryan was included in such ground breaking exhibitions as "Human Condition/Personal Torment," at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969, as well as "Ten Independents," in 1972, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Maryan's work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY, Musee National d'Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou, Paris, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., among others.

*The essay "The Work of Maryan: An Injunction to See," written by Jeanne Marie Wasilik in the book "Maryan Behold a Man and His Work" was an important source for this press release.

ADAM BAUMGOLD GALLERY

74 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10021

www.adambaumgoldgallery.com

Colin Brant, Adam Baumgold Gallery, NYC - The Garden of the World (And Getting There)

Colin Brant

The Garden of the World (And Getting There)

Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

October 18 — November 24, 2001

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents the first New York solo exhibition by Colin Brant of paintings "The Garden of the World (And Getting There)." These idiosyncratic oil paintings, relating to the discovery, exploration, and settlement of the American landscape, show a vision of a world that seems impractically optimistic and idealistic.

In his catalog essay for the exhibition, Charles Taliaferro (1) writes: "Colin Brant's work is informed by the idealized landscapes of early American folk painting. He captures the simple, vernacular coherence and eccentricities of the tradition, especially with his use of perspective, the scenes within scenes, and the shifts in depth of field. There is a stillness to these paintings which invites reverie, an unhurried exploration of forests, fields, lakes, grottos, and mountains. As viewers, we share in the adventures of travelers as they journey and rest through these pastoral constructions. At the same time there are surprising interruptions in which these worlds are called into question. We are allowed to enjoy these Arcadian scenes but we are also cautioned against being over earnest. In "Edge of the Dark Forest," for example, humor prevails as deer potter about and a squirrel clings desperately to a tree - all under the watchful eye of a contented owl. The paintings raise questions gently; I do not see the work in terms of pure satire. The irony in Brant's work, if there is any, is romantic. It is at once dissembling and heartening, gently checking out enthusiasm for the genuine charm and enchantment of the worlds he brings to us."

"The American folk tradition produced work which was explicitly personal, highly interpretive, and sometimes driven by profound values. Brant does not advance an explicit moral text like the American primitive artist Edward Hicks who framed paintings with edifying verse. Even so, there is a tenderness and humanity in Brant's romantic irony which I read as non-utopian and in favor of personality. Walt Whitman wrote that 'the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery.' The same might be said of one of Colin Brant's paintings."

Colin Brant lives and works in New York City. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in painting.

(1) Charles Taliaferro teaches aesthetics at St. Olaf College; his writing has been published in the British Journal of Aesthetics and elsewhere.

ADAM BAUMGOLD GALLERY

74 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10021

www.adambaumgoldgallery.com

Deborah Barrett, Adam Baumgold Gallery, NYC - Bestiary

Deborah Barrett: Bestiary

Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

April 19 — May 25, 2001

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents an exhibition by Deborah Barrett, "Bestiary," of constructions and works on paper.

The constructions range from toy trophy plaques, to plaster and wood sculptures of animal heads, to animals standing upright in the manner of humans. Using wood, fabric and animal hides, the work is a fusion of toy, totem and reliquary, as when a two-legged horsehair rabbit stands atop a concrete base like a beguiling monument in a strange, haunting park.

Also included in the exhibition is graphite and mixed media works on paper, photogravures and Iris prints of animals in their various guises and transformations.

In all these works, there is a sampling of the uneasy and contradictory relationship of man to animal. A clue to Deborah Barrett's mixed intentions can be found in Charles Baudelaire when he wrote that the toy is a child's first art object and invariably that toy is an animal hibernating at the root of our complex, conflicting nostalgia.

This is Deborah Barrett's second solo exhibition at Adam Baumgold Gallery. Her work is included in private collections throughout Europe and the US and has been in the New York Times, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. She currently lives and works in California.

ADAM BAUMGOLD GALLERY

74 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10021

www.adambaumgoldgallery.com