Chicago Style Exhibition @ Georges Adams Gallery, NYC - Featured Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum

Chicago Style

Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, and Karl Wirsum

George Adams Gallery, New York

December 13, 2024 – February 8, 2025

The George Adams Gallery presents Chicago Style, a group exhibition highlighting key figures from Chicago’s vibrant mid-to-late 20th century art scene. The show features works by Joanna Beall, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Barbara Rossi, H.C. Westermann, and Karl Wirsum. 

This exhibition traces the development of a unique Chicago aesthetic, shaped by artists from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the Hyde Park Art Center. These artists rejected the dominant trends of New York and the West Coast, creating diverse and unconventional work in movements like surrealism, figuration, abstraction, and social commentary. 

The exhibition also reflects their overlapping careers and collaborations, such as the 1949 Exhibition Momentum organized by Golub and Lanyon, which included Ito. The spirit of collaboration continued with the founding of Superior Street Gallery by Ito and Lanyon in the 1950s.

Allan Frumkin Gallery, which opened in Chicago in 1952, played a key role in supporting many of these artists and elevating their work beyond the city. Frumkin gave Leon Golub, and H.C. Westermann their first solo exhibitions in Chicago, and employed Ellen Lanyon as a restorer and Jim Nutt as an art handler, fostering a dynamic creative community. By showcasing these artists in both his Chicago and New York galleries, Frumkin helped establish the unique aesthetic that defined Chicago’s mid-20th-century art scene. 

Works in the exhibition includes paintings from the late 1950s by Golub and Ito, works from the 1960s by Lanyon and Beall, and examples from the 1970s by Brown, Nilsson, Paschke, Rossi, and Wirsum. Of special note is Westermann’s The Death Ship (Black Tar Death Ship) from 1974 that has never been offered since it was acquired by a private collector in the late 1970s. 

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Enrique Chagoya @ George Adams Gallery, NYC - Borderless Exhibition

Enrique Chagoya: Borderless

George Adams Gallery, New York

April 7 – May 13, 2023

The George Adams Gallery presents Borderless, a presentation of new work by Enrique Chagoya across various mediums. The exhibition features three new large paintings and a new codex, all on Amate paper, as well as a survey of his use of that format over the past 20 years. This is Enrique Chagoya’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery since 2000.

As with much of his recent work, Enrique Chagoya continues to explore the colonial construct of “boundaries” – those that are created artificially through racial, social, economic and territorial divides. By conflating the ancient and the modern, the social and the political, the serious and the humorous, Enrique Chagoya pokes holes in the assumption of boundaries as being a necessary aspect of modern civilization. Himself a Mexican immigrant to the United States, his identity as an “alien” has long informed his work, allowing him to approach his subjects as an insider and outsider simultaneously. Pulling from a wide, cross-cultural vocabulary, Enrique Chagoya brings together such disparate visual idioms as comic book heroes, religious iconography, traditional Mayan figures and ethnographic illustrations, juxtaposing these disparate elements to create a wholly new visual language. By addressing such constructs as the “Enlightened Savage,” “Illegal Alien” or “Romantic Cannibal,” many of his works purport to be “Guides” to the so-called Western World. However, instead of clarifying the inner workings of, for instance, the economy to a supposed outsider, Enrique Chagoya instead highlights the absurdity of the systems that control our lives.

In Enrique Chagoya’s most recent paintings, his attention is focused on the complexities of immigration, specifically in the United States. The four canvases completed this year each touch on contentious aspects of the country’s immigration policy through the lens of the nation’s history. In Detention at the Border of Language, he envisions a “trans-continental Border Patrol” as “a reminder that all nations in the Americas were created by undocumented immigrants from Europe.” Similarly, Everyone is an Alien reminds us that identities are fluid and in societies like the United States, xenophobia amounts to hypocrisy. A more sobering statement of the very real impact of immigration policy is his new multi-panel codex painting, Wild Spirits that Shine Obstinately Beyond Walls. With a graphic representation of the southern border wall running across it, Chagoya adds expressive portraits of so-called “Dreamers” in red-white-blue paint, smiling in defiance of the barriers – both physical and social – they are forced to overcome. Issues of assimilation and polarization also come into play in his other codex painting, The New Codex Ytrebil, which takes the form of small books made by Indigenous peoples of Central America in the 16th-century. While these books were used in the instruction of the catechism, Chagoya’s secular version taps into the hysteria of modern day concerns such as “ycarcomed” (democracy), “dadlaugi” (igualdad) and “egnahc” (change).

At the core of Enrique Chagoya’s work is the violent history of Central America, in which the ancient Indigenous cultures were decimated by the Spanish conquest. Enrique Chagoya began creating his own versions of Mesoamerican books in the early 1990s, in part as an engagement with his personal heritage but also as a tool for critique. As few original Mayan codices survive – most were destroyed by conquistadores – and of those, none pre-date the conquests, Enrique Chagoya uses this dearth of information to bring a revisionist approach to history. While on the one hand his codices follow the traditional format of right-to-left reading, eschew written text in favor of images and are done on handmade Amate paper, the appearance of modern day symbols such as jet planes or Spider Man, bring them into the present. Colonizing actions, from military invasions to artistic appropriations, are upended in the Enrique Chagoya canon, as he imagines an alternative past where the roles have been reversed. Over the course of the past twenty years he has produced many codices, both printed and drawn, eight of which are on view here. Collectively they highlight the evolution of Enrique Chagoya’s practice and the range of subjects he brings to bear in his work – in the codex format and beyond.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.georgeadamsgallery.com

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Robert Colescott @ George Adams Gallery, NYC - Frankly...

Robert Colescott: Frankly...

George Adams Gallery, New York

Through July 1, 2022

The George Adams Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the late artist, Robert Colescott (1925-2009). Celebrated for his incisive send-ups of art-historical tropes and the experience of being a Black man in the United States, Robet Colescott’s paintings continue to engage and provoke. This exhibition will feature works predominantly from the 1990s, a period which encompasses his selection in 1997 as representative of the United States at the 47th Venice Biennale.

Race is at the center of Robert Colescott’s paintings as a meaty, many-faceted concern that he tackles from every direction. His language is one of stereotypes and appropriation, used to often-comic effect while lampooning the basis of such prejudices. Weaving figures into complex, narrative sequences that combine aspects of current events, racial politics and popular culture, Colescott brings to light the inherent contradictions of society while refusing to shirk from the less than savory aspects. From the late 1980s on, his paintings grew more complex in their compositions and layering of vignettes, references and regions of bold color. In a conversation from 1989, Robert Colescott noted this shift, explaining, “the more years I take on, the more aware I am of the complexities of it all, of life, of art, and of my reactions.”

One of the more pervasive subjects of Robert Colescott’s work is inter-racial tensions, particularly in the context of sex - as he put it, “you can’t talk about race without talking sex in America.” In the painting Frankly My Dear... I Don’t Give a Damn (1990) he references the 1939 film “Gone With the Wind” and its famous line. While one of the most lauded films in history, since its release, “Gone With the Wind” has been infamous for its problematic depiction of slavery. In the foreground of the painting, a Rhett Butler-esque man cradles a swooning woman - not the heroine of the film but a Black woman in a check dress and turban, presumably meant to indicate her servitude. Here Colescott is subverting the central love story of the movie, co-opting Butler’s parting line into a defiance of racial prejudices. Such considerations also appear in Blues’ Angel (1990), picturing a suave Black singer with a white woman in a blue dress looking on. The title is likely a reference to the New York nightclub, The Blue Angel, which opened in 1943 and was one of the first de-segregated clubs in the city. Colescott may also be playing with the name - in her blue dress, is it the woman or the singer who is the “Angel” here?

Beyond such controversial references, other, more mainstream cultural icons appear in Colescott’s work, including Dagwood Bumstead (1996), the everyman of comic fame, preparing to bite into his signature sandwich while his wife Blondie looks on disapprovingly. In a more biographical turn, the painting Signs and Monuments (Kilroy) (1999) incorporates a number of personal references while more broadly offering a send up of capitalism. The ‘Kilroy’ of the title derives from a popular graffiti tag employed by service men during WWII. Usually written as “Kilroy was here” along with a cartoon of a man peering over a wall, Colescott, who served in the Army during the war and most certainly was familiar with the image, reproduces the tag with few alterations besides abbreviating the line. Elsewhere in the painting, a bloated cartoon face features the caption ‘The Sphinx’ and a few outlines of pyramids round out the allusion to Colescott’s time spent in Cairo in the late ’60s – a formative experience.

While Robert Colescott spent less than two years in Egypt, the effect was profound. His study of Egyptian art, both ancient and contemporary, informed his approach to figurative painting, including the emergence of race as a subject that he would go on to finesse after his return to the States in 1969. It also marked a stylistic shift: his use of acrylics over oils and an increasingly colorful palette, both of which characterize Robert Colescott’s work for the rest of of his career. Particularly in his later works, there is a balance of expressionistic passages and a biting, very American satire. As Robert Colescott described it, the result is “an integrated ‘one-two punch’,” where the first impact is “‘Oh wow!’ And then, ‘oh shit!’ when they see what they have to deal with in subject matter.”

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.georgeadamsgallery.com

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Jeremy Anderson @ George Adams Gallery, NYC

Jeremy Anderson: Between, Beyond, 1953-64
George Adams Gallery, New York
March 7 – April 20, 2019

The George Adams Gallery presents an exhibition of sculptures and related drawings by California artist Jeremy Anderson (1921-1982), in what will be his first solo exhibition in New York since 1954. The focus is on the ‘50s and early ‘60s, with sculptures in wood and metal and drawings in pencil and mixed media. Generally overlooked in the greater narrative of post-war, Northern California sculpture, Jeremy Anderson was nevertheless one of the most quietly influential artists of his time, spanning the conventions of surrealism, ‘Funk’ and pop art to synthesize “a whole new iconography particular to American art.”

Jeremy Anderson was part of the generation of artists to attend the California School of Fine Arts on the GI Bill, himself having served in the Navy during WWII. The decade following the war which he studied (and later taught) at the school was characterized by intense experimentation and cross-disciplinary exchange. With a distinct style of expressionist painting emerging, through the example of Hassel Smith, David Park, but most notably Clyfford Still, similar headway was occurring in three dimensions under the disparate examples of Robert Howard (biomorphic) and Clay Spohn (Dada-esque). Though the ideas and imagery of surrealism remained a common reference for those working in both two and three dimensions, the art being made by Jeremy Anderson and his peers quickly evolved into something else entirely.

For his part, while Jeremy Anderson’s sculpture initially drew from the work of artists such as Gorky, Giacometti and Miró, he also considered that sculpture had the unique potential to express intangible concepts: “ideas, being a soul with no body, have to assume some form.” After a trip to Europe following his graduation in 1951, he became increasingly engaged with ancient civilizations, or rather the artifacts that define them. The collection of medieval arms and armaments at the de Young Museum was also an early reference point and the physical and aesthetic qualities of those objects carried through to his sculptures and drawings well into the ‘60s. After experimenting with various materials, he began working primarily in redwood - which was cheap and readily available. Carving bulbous, totemic forms and table top sculptures evoking dream-like environments or staged battles, his work of the mid-1950s (which was rarely titled) remains enigmatic yet evocative.

By the early ‘60s, these surreal abstractions were increasingly gaining figurative touches with forms or appendages suggestive of human or human-adjacent objects. Major sculptures such as ‘Between’ and ‘Beyond’ (both 1961) allude to a house and a ship, respectively, populated by fragments of his earlier biomorphic forms. While in some ways rigorous and formal, Jeremy Anderson’s work also holds a grain of humor - increasingly so in his sculpture post-1961, as he began to introduce color and text, as well as titles. Such additions brought into focus his enduring preoccupation with mythologies of both the personal and universal sort, solidifying his concept of sculpture as a representation of intangibles. Similarly, drawings became a space for free association, with language becoming the medium of choice; one drawing from 1966 states boldly: “WARP LANGUAGE TO FIT SCULPTURE.”

JEREMY ANDERSON was born in Palo Alto, California in 1921 and died in Mill Valley, CA in 1982. He received a BFA from CSFA (now SFAI) in 1950, where he later taught for nearly two decades. Jeremy Anderson has been the subject of three major retrospectives, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1966, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1975 and the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art in 1995. His work is included in public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
531 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: from Pop to Politics, CB1-G Gallery, Los Angeles

Peter Saul: from Pop to Politics
CB1-G Gallery, Los Angeles
January 7 – February 18, 2017

George Adams Gallery, New York presents an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Peter Saul at CB1-G in Los Angeles. The exhibition features 20 works made between 1957 and 1967 covering his development as an artist from the late 1950s through his transition from Pop in the early 1960’s to a politically engaged, topical artist whose works tackled the most pressing issues of the day in the later half of the decade.

Having spent most of the early 1960’s working in Paris, Peter Saul claimed to have been largely unaware of the Pop Art movement, unfamiliar with the artists most typically associated with it. But critics reviewing his first exhibitions in New York and Chicago recognized him as a Pop artist though without the cool detachment preferred by most of Pop’s other practitioners. As Ellen Johnson pointed wrote in her 1964 catalogue essay: “Where Lichtenstein appears to be amused and Warhol indifferent, Saul is angry…” And indeed he was – increasingly so.

Returning to the San Francisco Bay Area from Paris in late 1964, Peter Saul’s work noticeably shifted to images of war, gradually displacing images from comics and the like. Soon his work was dominated by the war in Vietnam and topical social issues, such as civil rights. Increasingly Saul was dismissed by some critics as a ‘political’ artist, which only encouraged him, believing as he did that if what he was doing provoked the ‘tastemakers’ then he must be on the right track. As the artist wrote in 1967, “Now I think I have…paintings that could prohibit a sophisticated response. Not just because of ‘obscenity,’ which is prevalent, but because it is coupled with politics. I am polarizing things, want to see good and bad.”

The exhibition begins chronologically with a group of pastels, including a self-portrait. They were made in 1957, while Peter Saul lived in Holland and demonstrate an early interest in distortion and the grotesque. In addition there are several paintings and drawings from the early 60’s dating to Peter Saul’s time in Paris, including Ice Box #3 (1961), Gun Moll (1962), and Untitled (Superman) (1963). Examples of the later more political work include New China a large drawing from 1965, and the politically charged lithograph GI On a Cross and large canvas, I Torture Commy Virgins, both from 1967.

CB1 GALLERY
1923 Street Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles
www.cb1gallery.com

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
531 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: Radical Figure, Paintings and Drawings from the 1960s and 1970s, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Radical Figure, Paintings and Drawings from the 1960s and 1970s 
George Adams Gallery, New York 
April 4 – May 31, 2013 

George Adams Gallery presents PETER SAUL: RADICAL FIGURE, an exhibition featuring 20 paintings and drawings from the 1960s and 1970s.

Peter Saul: Radical Figure traces Saul’s career from his involvement with Pop-Art in the early 1960s to his tackling of contemporary political subjects in the later 1960s and “art about art” in the 1970s. While his Pop and political works were intentionally provocative, even this last series could be surprisingly controversial: In 1988 the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s acquisition committee was horrified by Peter Saul’s 10-foot long version of Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (they acquired his “View of San Francisco #2,” 1986, instead).

Notable in the exhibition are a number of paintings never before or only rarely exhibited: “Gun Moll” and “Valda Sherman” both from 1961, “Girl #2,” 1962, (paired in the exhibition with “Girl #1” from the same year), and “California Artist,” 1973, (a portrait of William T. Wiley featured in Saul’s exhibition at Allan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago, that same year). Seldom or never exhibited works on paper include “Toobs,” 1963, “New China #1,” 1965, “Tuff Sister,” 1970, and studies for “Picasso’s Guernica,” 1976, “Nightwatch,” 1977, and “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” 1978.

Peter Saul has been the subject of four comprehensive museum retrospective exhibitions in the United States and abroad. He has exhibited regularly with this gallery since 1960, as well as with other galleries in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, and Geneva. His work is in numerous museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
525 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: Prints and Drawings, 1960-1975, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Prints and Drawings, 1960-1975
George Adams Gallery, New York
February 26 – April 11, 2009

George Adams Gallery will exhibit drawings and prints from 1960 to 1975 by PETER SAUL. The exhibition, which surveys Peter Saul's artistic progression from Pop Art to politics, fills the gallery's two exhibition spaces with 20 works, several of which have never been shown before.

Born in San Francisco in 1934, Peter Saul attended the California School of Fine Arts before earning a degree from the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Over the next nine years, he gained recognition as a Pop artist while living abroad in Holland, France and Italy. Upon his return to the United States and to the Bay Area in 1965 he became increasingly radical and focused on some of the most scorching issues of the Vietnam Era.

The exhibition begins chronologically with two drawings from 1960. One is a rare "Icebox" drawing, possibly one of only two Peter Saul made to complement his series of paintings of the same subject. The exhibition continues with "Superman" from 1961, "Cash" and "Marfak," from 1965, several drawings from his "Mill Valley" series of 1966-67, and "Gud Art," 1970, an outrageous day-glo rendering of Bobby Kennedy entwined with Pat Nixon.

In the Drawing Gallery is a complete set of Peter Saul's political prints, nine in all. "White Sex," from 1966, is a small black and white lithograph and his first on the theme of the Vietnam War. Also included are "Commie Girl," and "GI on the Cross," both from 1967, "Angela Davis" from 1972 and the infamous "Veetnam Amboosh" of 1975.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
525 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: Suburbia, Paintings and Drawings, 1965-1969, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Suburbia, Paintings and Drawings, 1965-1969
George Adams Gallery, New York
February 13 – March 27, 2004

The George Adams Gallery presents Peter Saul: Suburbia, a selection of works by Peter Saul dating from 1965-1969. Upon his return from an 8-year sojourn in Europe, Saul, who was born in San Francisco, settled in Mill Valley, California in 1965.  From 1965 until approximately 1972, Peter Saul produced a series of works that featured images of Northern California suburbia--modern homes, cars, roads, the Golden Gate Bridge, and palm trees -- rendered in the artist's characteristic Day-Glo colors and cartoon inflected style.

Peter Saul: Suburbia features 10 related drawings and one large-scale painting. Produced at the same time as the protest paintings, which garnered Saul a reputation as a political painter, the suburbia series present the banality of Saul's everyday surroundings as a source of social critique. As David Zack observed in his 1969 Artnews article "That's Saul, Folks," "[In] Saul's new series of suburban houses the color and outline keep the scene from seeming macabre.  It is more the dispassionate humor of Magritte than the hysteria of Ensor." Included in the current exhibition, for example, is Suburban House II, c. 1969, which depicts an inter-connected community of luxury modern homes rendered in electric pinks and greens, while Suburban Houses I, with similar imagery, has the addition of real-estate values prominently noted next to each house.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Upper Class Lower Class, 1966, a canvas that juxtaposes a superhero couple and a suburbanite couple, surrounded by roads leading nowhere, bridges made of dollar and cent symbols, and rainbow colored houses and buildings.  With a trenchant observation of the social and economic disparity between San Francisco and wealthier Marin County just over the Golden Gate Bridge, Saul plays out his critique in a cartoonish slightly grotesque style.  Other works echo this theme, including two drawings Cash, 1967-68 and Marfak, 1965 which focus on California's car culture with images of gas stations and gas guzzling automobiles.

Three of the works also include extraneous drawing a revealing look at Peter Saul's compositional and conceptual process. In Modern Home ABCD, c. 1966, for example, a red Gumby figure foregrounds a fully rendered cut-away view of a suburban home, which is flanked by a swimming pool, a tree-house, and a low flying airplane all drawn in faint pencil. Similarly, Modern Home, c. 1969, shifts between simple line drawing and full color depicting several homes all architecturally styled on stilts to accommodate "the view" from a hill or ocean bluff. With characteristic humor and wit, Peter Saul's modern homes reveal the illogical construction of high-style Marin County architecture.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: Paintings and Drawings, 1984-1999, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Paintings and Drawings, 1984-1999
George Adams Gallery, New York
July 9 – August 12, 1999

George Adams Gallery presents paintings and drawings by Peter Saul. The exhibition includes five canvases and three drawings from the period between 1984 and 1999. The Gallery's exhibition coincides with the opening of a retrospective exhibition that will tour four venues in France and Belgium, starting at the Musée de L'abbaye de Sainte Croix, Sables D'Olonne and closing at the Musée Mons, in Belgium. The retrospective exhibition is accompanied by a major monograph comprised of 168 pages with 130 illustrations, an interview with the artist and four essays, including one by Robert Storr.  The text will be published in French and English, and will be available in the U.S. later this summer.

The gallery exhibition includes works dealing with all of Peter Saul's favorite themes. For example, one of the works in the show is from a series of paintings and drawings featuring Ronald Reagan as president. Ronald Reagan in Grenada (1984) depicts a vibrantly colored Reagan single-handedly subduing the Grenada army with fingertip lasers and cans of Coca-Cola. Also included are both the painting and study for Jeffrey Dahmer Won't Eat His Vegetables, 1992, one of many works featuring sexual deviates in electric chairs that have occupied a special place in Peter Saul's work since 1960.

The two most recent works included are Your Brain Says No and The Death of Venus, both from 1999. According to Peter Saul, no one else is doing death, so he thought he would give it a try. ("Someone has to do it," he says). Other works in the show cover such themes as the art world (Art Critics' Suicide, 1996) and women (Woman Artist II, 1984).

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
50 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: Early Paintings and Related Drawings, 1960-1964, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Early Paintings and Related Drawings, 1960-1964
George Adams Gallery, New York
January 1 – 31, 1998

In 1956, Peter Saul graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and moved with his first wife to Europe. After a brief stay in London, they lived in Amsterdam (1956-1958), near Paris (1958-1962), and finally in Rome (1962 -1964) before returning to the US and settling in Mill Valley, California. It was during this period that Saul defined himself as an artist. At the outset a self-described expressionist painter of landscapes and interiors, Peter Saul soon developed the major themes that remain central to his work even today. The present exhibition consists of paintings and drawings made during his years in Europe which reflect Peter Saul's artistic development as a social critic as well as his involvement with Pop Art, a movement with which he was identified during this time.

Peter Saul was fascinated from an early age by movies and the comics, and even after art school their influence persisted. According to Peter Saul, "The years 1959 - 1961 were pretty much used in reconciling specific drawings from Mad [Magazine] with my need to resemble deKooning." The influence of popular culture - especially the comics - is evident not only in Saul's style and use of cartoon characters - Superman, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck appear as early as 1960  - but also of dialogue balloons, and multi-panel compositions. Along with a cast of characters out of Disney, greed, sex and violence - tabloid subjects that continue to remain central to Peter Saul's work  - make their first appearances during this period.

Peter Saul was not interested in simply making cartoon painting, however: "The problem with cartooniness is that it smooths out too many bumps... To get those 'bumps' back is a lot of work... I summon my memory of drawings on lavatory walls. That usually does it." These early paintings and drawings employ an over-all composition and mark-making typically associated with abstract-expressionism and, at the same time, a visual vocabulary composed entirely of images from popular culture. For all their references to popular culture, Peter Saul was not in fact a "Pop" artist. While he was initially considered a member of the movement and was even included in several Pop surveys (Lucy Lippard's Pop Art of 1966, for example), he was soon dropped and only recently reinstated through his inclusion in the LA County/Whitney Museum's recent "Hand Painted Pop."

The most important distinction between Peter Saul and the artists usually identified with Pop Art is that Peter Saul was interested in the psychological. And, while his early works share similarities with artists such as Lichtenstein, Rivers or Rosenquist, it is artists such as deKooning, Beckmann and Francis Bacon who should be looked to as more important sources. Paintings such as IceBox #3 or Valda Sherman, for example, are rooted less in the Pop Art of Rivers than in social commentary of Bacon and Beckmann. According to Peter Saul, as far as Pop Art was concerned, "my painting had too much emotion." 

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: New Paintings, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: New Paintings
George Adams Gallery, New York
September 20 – October 31, 1996

George Adams Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Peter Saul. 

The paintings in the exhibition, all completed in 1996, cover a wide range of subject matter, including current affairs (OJ Simpson and Newt Gingerich), art history (the Mona Lisa, Dali and Duchamp), and even art criticism (a double portrait of Hilton Kramer and Peter Schjeldahl committing suicide). 

The exhibition also features Peter Saul's first still-life painting, one of his most animated compositions to date.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
50 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Jose Bedia, George Adams Gallery, New York

Jose Bedia: Mi Essencialismo / My Essentialism
George Adams Gallery, New York
May 10 – June 7, 1996

George Adams Gallery presents Mi Esencialismo - My Essentialism, a new series of paintings and drawings by Jose Bedia. The exhibition was jointly organized by the George Adams Gallery, New York, the Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, and the Pori Art Museum, Pori, Finland. Mi Esencialismo is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by Judith Bettelheim, Professor of Art at San Francisco State University, and Melissa Feldman, curator of the 1994 Jose Bedia survey exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Ten drawings and eight paintings from the series, as well as an installation created for the New York venue, are on view.

"Essentialism," writes Judith Bettelheim, "is most broadly understood as referring to a fixed aspect of a given entity." Which in ethnology translates as an immutable cultural characteristic. The anti-essentialist view, which Jose Bedia shares, holds that a culture is never pure, but is constantly altered through contact with other cultures. As Ms. Feldman points out, "through his knowledge of ethnology and extensive travel, Bedia has adopted a pancultural point of view which acknowledges a fundamental commonality among different belief systems." Jose Bedia, who is of mixed - Spanish and African - descent, was born in Cuba in 1960. At the core of his art is the language, imagery and beliefs of Santeria and Palo Monte, Afro-Cuban religions brought to Cuba during the 19th Century by slaves (the Kongo and the Yoruba of what is now Angola). Other significant influences are the Indians and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas, as well as artists as diverse as Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg and H.C. Westermann.

In this exhibition Jose Bedia presents two series of paintings and drawings that combine 19th Century photographs of the Kongo and of North American Indians with his own hand-rendered versions of the same image. Jose Bedia's re-rendered images are intended to present a non-Western viewpoint, supplying critical information that, as Melissa Feldman writes, "fills out the image to its full iconic potency." Jose Bedia's aim is not to deny the accuracy of the photograph, but to elucidate the additional layers of meaning in order to allow for a more sophisticated reading of the image or event depicted in the photograph.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Updated 15.07.2019