Tag Archives: galerie st. etienne

GALLERY NIGHT ON 57th ST.

Josef Hoflehner, “Door Open Wide – Japan,” selenium toned silver print, 2012 (courtesy Bonni Benrubi Gallery)

Some three dozen galleries along 57th St. between Third & Eighth Aves. will remain open until 8:00 on Thursday night, many holding opening or closing receptions or other special programming as part of the semiannual Gallery Night on 57th St. Among the participants and their current shows, recommended in a westerly direction, are Nailya Alexander (“Evgeny Mokhorev: Photographs 1991-20120”), Bonni Benrubi (“Joseph Hoflehner: Into the Calm”), Edwynn Houk (“August Sander: Citizens of the Twentieth Century”), Frederico Sève (“Fanny Sanín: Drawings and Studies 1960 to Now”), Pace/MacGill (“A Tribute to Robert Delpire”), the Pace Gallery (“Robert Irwin: Dotting the i’s & Crossing the t’s: Part I”), Tibor de Nagy (“Larry Rivers: Later Works”), Nohra Haime (“Natalia Arias: No Permanent, No Perpetual”), Gering & López (“Ryan McGinness: Women: Sketches & Solutions”), Galerie St. Etienne (“‘Mad as Hell!’ New Work [and Some Classics] by Sue Coe”), Marian Goodman (“Giuseppe Penone”), and Francis M. Naumann (“Sophie Matisse: It’s Time”).

GALLERY NIGHT ON 57th ST.

Red Grooms, “Bumper to Bumper,” acrylic and mixed media on wood, 2009 (courtesy Marlborough Gallery)

More than forty galleries along 57th St. between Lexington & Eighth Aves. will remain open until 8:00 on Thursday night, many holding opening or closing receptions or other special programming as part of the semiannual Gallery Night on 57th St. Among the participants, and their current shows, are Edwynn Houk (“Herb Ritts,” “Hannes Schmed: Cowboy”), the Pace Gallery (“Ad Reinhardt: Works from 1935-1945”), Bernarducci.Meisel (“The New York Project: Paintings of the City by Artists from Around the World”), Marian Goodman (“Gabriel Orozco: Corplegados and Particles”), Tibor de Nagy (“John Beerman: Recent Paintings”), Gering & López (David Levinthal’s “Attack of the Bricks: Star Wars”), Michael Rosenfeld (“Evolution in Action”), Marlborough (“Red Grooms, New York: 1976-2011”), Howard Greenberg (“Beyond Words: Photography in the New Yorker”), and Galerie St. Etienne (“The Lady and the Tramp: Images of Women in Austrian & German Art”).

SEVENTY YEARS GRANDMA MOSES

Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, “Going to Grandma’s,” oil on board, 1944 (© Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York)

A LOAN EXHIBITION CELEBRATING THE 70th ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARTIST’S DISCOVERY
Galerie St. Etienne
24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday-Saturday through April 3
212-245-6734
www.gseart.com

Seventy years ago, Galerie St. Etienne held a solo exhibition of the work of a self-taught painter from upstate New York. The eighty-year-old artist, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, chose not to attend the opening of “What a Farmwife Painted” because she was already familiar with all the canvases. Also known as Grandma Moses, she painted idyllic scenes in a folksy style, Americana as seen through a primitivist lens. One of her earliest champions was Galerie St. Etienne founder Otto Kallir, who collected outsider art in addition to such German Expressionists as Egon Schiele, Käthe Kollwitz, Emil Nolde, and Oskar Kokoschka. Kallir’s granddaughter Jane, who now runs the gallery, is celebrating the seventieth anniversary of Grandma Moses’s entrée into the international art world with a revelatory retrospective that will change everything you ever thought about the famous octagenarian.

Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, “When Leaves Turn,” oil on board, 1943 (© Grandma Moses Properties Co., New York)

Nearly seventy works are on view, in addition to archival photographs and some of Moses’s tools. Using oil paint on board or pressed wood, Moses created charming landscapes of her town, horizontal images often with small figures in the foreground, houses and barns in the middle of the canvas, and sky in the upper third. Bathed in spring greens or winter whites, the pictures depict such activities as taking in the laundry, celebrating weddings and holidays, making apple butter, flying a kite, and sledding through the snow. The peaceful settings are interrupted in several works by storms that have hit or are on their way. Two of the most vibrant pieces are “The Quilting Bee,” which features her boldest use of color and is the only painting set indoors, and “When Leaves Turn,” dominated by gorgeous fall hues. The show reveals that Moses was no mere curiosity; she was a skilled painter with a unique visual language. As the excellent exhibition essay concludes, “After seventy years, Grandma Moses’s achievement endures. This, in the end, is the mark of artistic greatness: the ability of the work to survive in multiple shifting contexts and remain forever fresh.”