Betty Cuningham Gallery Presents An Armory Show 3/2

Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in The Armory Show - Modern. The show opens for a professional preview on March 2 and remains open to the public March 3 - 6, 2011 on Pier 92, located at West 55th Street and 12th Avenue, New York City. The gallery's booth is 142.

The gallery will be exhibiting a selection of work in both the primary and secondary markets. The focal piece of the exhibit is Days on Blue, a steel and etched glass work by Christopher Wilmarth from 1974, a maquette for the sculpture of the same name, which was the largest work made by Wilmarth.

Reminiscent of the gallery's show Pearlstein/Held Five Decades, there will be a recent Philip Pearlstein work alongside two Al Held paintings from 1985. The juxtaposition of Pearlstein and Held reminds us of the differing routes each artist took from Abstract Expressionism: Pearlstein committing to realism and Held to hard abstraction. In the recent work of Pearlstein and the late work of Held, both artists explode with more intense color and greater complexity but remain within their own idiom, one figurative and the other abstract.

David Bates, a new addition to the gallery's stable, will be featured in the booth with a recent painting. A Dallas, TX native, Bates finds his subject matter close at hand whether it be a still life or images from the Gulf Coast or cityscapes and portraits from Katrina-torn New Orleans. His paintings acknowledge debt to a wide range of artists including Marsden Hartley, Picasso, Max Beckmann and many others. Hanging in the booth will be a painting from his Gulf Coast series, titled Three Fishermen, from 2010. Bates has been showing in New York since 1983 and just closed a one man traveling exhibition of the Katrina Paintings which originated at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City MO. His first show at Betty Cuningham Gallery will be in October of 2011.

Also featured are: three small still lifes by William Bailey, each painted from memory in an Italian palate of muted tones; two minimalist, four-plate enamel paintings by Jennifer Bartlett from the early 1970s; a recent oil on linen painting by Jake Berthot; a small, visionary painting from 1946 by Forrest Bess; two 12 x 10" minimalist paintings of vibrant pigment on limestone by Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi; a broad view canvas, by Rackstraw Downes, painted on site in 2009 and titled Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street; several works on paper by Suzan Frecon; and a postcard painting, Cat on a Rock by William Wegman.