Solo exhibition
Artemis · Greenberg Van Doren · Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by the late American abstract expressionist James Brooks (1906 – 1992). This is the first selected survey of Brooks’ paintings in New York in five years and inaugurates the gallery’s representation of the artist’s estate. The show will be on view from October 8 through November 15, 2003.
The exhibition will feature twelve canvases that span Brooks mid-to-late career, with paintings that range in size from small to large scale. Art historian Sarah K. Rich writes in the accompanying catalogue:
“The works in this exhibit, most of which were produced in the later decades of his career, offer up tempestuous surfaces and bold forms that exemplify the best of Brooks’s efforts. Though they all might seem rather different from one another, virtually all of these works rigorously explore the ways in which a canvas might both enact and represent the processes of painting. They explore the ways in which boundaries operate between shapes. They test the flatness of a canvas in relationship to the spatial effects suggested by form and color. But what is perhaps most interesting about Brooks’s paintings is that they simultaneously exemplify and challenge the very notion of spontaneous mark-making that so preoccupied Abstract Expressionists.”