Over the Top: Painting on a Grand Scale: Works by Ross Bleckner, Antonio Carreno, Paul Jenkins, James Meyer, Peter Nadin, Philip Tsiaras

February 07 - April 12, 2003
Opening: February 7, 2003 6-8:30 pm

About exhibition

Exhibition: “Over the Top”: Painting on a Grand Scale 
Location: 6 Depot Place, Scarsdale, NY 10583
Dates: February 7- March 22, 2003
Opening Reception: Friday, Feb 7, 6-8:30pm

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of contemporary painting entitled Over the Top: Painting on a Grand Scale. The exhibition includes six large scale works by six contemporary artists: Ross Bleckner, Antonio Carreno, Paul Jenkins, James Meyer, Peter Nadin and Philip Tsiaras. The canvases, ranging from three to more than seven feet in size, present a rare opportunity to view major examples of each artist’s work. In each instance, the “scale” works to the artist’s advantage in achieving artistic propositions.

Internationally acclaimed painter Ross Bleckner contributes a recent work, “Untitled” 1999. The painting, exhibited at The Nassau County Museum of Art in 2001, features intricate, obsessive, all over patterning of cell-like shapes, which form a strangely elegant surface. Like a microscopic view blown up to immense proportions, the natural beauty of biology is enhanced through scale. Bleckner, born in 1949, was the subject of a mid-career retrospective exhibition at The Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1990. He continues to build upon his early achievements in the past decade.

Paul Jenkins’s exuberant “Phenomena” painting of 1979 comes alive through its outsize scale (the painting is 6 x 7 feet), where sprays of rainbow-colored prisms appear to explode from the stark white canvas into space. The sweeping flows of translucent color, achieved by the artist’s pouring of pure acrylic paint directly on to the canvas, are a practice he became famous for in the 1950’s. Jenkins, an integral member of the New York School, has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions in Germany, in 1964; at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1971; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1972, and the Musee Picasso, Antibes, France, in 1987.

The semi-abstract works of Philip Tsiaras and Antonio Carreno incorporate a central image on a complex, painterly, textural ground. In Tsiaras’s painting, the central image, a vessel, is outlined in thick black lines, its contents bubbling over the top, spilling onto the outer areas. In Carreno’s canvas, a horse is defined. It is surrounded by enigmatic signs and symbols revealed through washes of color and layers of paint.

Tsiaras, a New Hampshire native of Greek ancestry, has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, including The Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, Mannheimer Kunstverein, Mannheimer, Germany, and Pierides Museum, Athens, Greece. Carreno, born in the Dominican Republic in 1963, attended the National School of Fine Arts in Santo Domingo. He has participated in exhibitions at the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, Arizona State University Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo. 

Peter Nadin and James Meyer interpret the classical subject- the self-portrait- in intensely personal narratives. Nadin’s “Still Life with Figs and Flowers” ostensibly presents the interior of the artist’s studio, including tools, props and subject. The artist is nowhere in sight. Floating elements, dripping matter, carved out areas—provide clues to the artist’s subconscious motivations. Nadin, a poet and painter, teaches at The Cooper Union, in New York. He recently at The Yale University Art Museum, and has worked collaboratively with renown artists, Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince and Lawrence Weiner. 
Meyer’s self-portrait, as a boy, has the artist at center stage. He is presented as a musician, playing the accordion, partially in shadow.

A former studio assistant of Roy Lichtenstein, Meyer adopts his master’s technique, by replicating his image across the canvas. Meyer has participated in numerous exhibitions around the United States.

For further information, please contact Madelyn Jordon at 914-723-8738. 
Madelyn Jordon Fine Art
6 Depot Pl Scarsdale NY 10583
914 723-8738
www.madelynjordonfineart.com


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