Les Trois Rois

William Copley Exhibition and Swiss Candy Shop Project Set for Venus Over Manhattan, Spring 2013

Venus Over Manhattan will devote its 2013 spring program to American artist William Copley, with a New York exhibition and Swiss Candy Shop Project. (more...)

Venus Over Manhattan Celebrates William N. Copley

New York-born painter, writer, gallerist, collector, publisher and art entrepreneur William N. Copley (1919-1996) began his career in the arts as a dealer of Surrealist and Dada titans Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell and Yves Tanguy. Such was the impact of their work upon the imagination of this American eccentric - who dubbed himself CPLY - that he began to paint on his own in the 1950s after shuttering his Los Angeles gallery. Mixing eroticism, symbolism, whimsy and darkness, CPLY earned the enthusiastic encouragement of the very artists whose works his business had represented. By the early 1970s, he developed a signature style in which everyday objects or (more often and now legendarily) sexually explicit couplings were presented against lushly patterned backgrounds. In these paintings, Copley emerges as a mediator between European postwar art and American Pop Art, and a bemused if troubled guide through the charged sexual, psychological and emotional terra incognita he once referred to as "the tragedy of man and woman." (more...)

William Copley Exhibition and Swiss Candy Shop Project Set for Venus Over Manhattan, Spring 2013

Venus Over Manhattan will devote its 2013 spring program to American artist William Copley, with a New York exhibition and Swiss Candy Shop Project. (more...)