West Broadway Gallery Holds Opening Reception for Neil Jenney's IMPROVED PICASSOS Today, 2/14

The West Broadway Gallery will present an exhibition of Neil Jenney's "Improved Picassos" from February 14-April 30, 2016. This exhibition will extend the survey of "Improved Picassos" first seen at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue in 2013 and will include two of the paintings in that exhibition. This is the first time that all of the eight paintings in the series will be exhibited together. http://www.westbroadwaygallery.com/improved-picasos/

Between 2010-2015, Neil Jenney's hobby was improving Picasso's paintings. He bought and/or commissioned copies of Picasso paintings from artist Ki-Young Sung in order to improve the framing and the works themselves, which Jenney considered to be incomplete, unfinished, or misdrawn.

A copy of Picasso's Marie-Therese Leaning spotted by Jenney in artist Ki-Young Sung's New York Port Authority Bus Terminal studio started the series. Ki-Young Sung makes his living by painting portraits from wedding and graduation photographs. At slack moments, he paints reproductions of work by well-known artists including Picasso. Jenney bought the Marie-Therese painting and reworked it, making many noticeable changes (see above.) Coincidentally, Jenney had been thinking about the framing of Picasso paintings in museums and galleries and felt that he could do a better job. By purchasing Ki-Young Sung's copy, Jenney was able to experiment and created his now standard "Narrow Side - Clear Face - Side Seam Frame," that he used for all the Picassos in the series.

Jenney and Ki-Young Sung became friends and Jenney commissioned him to paint copies of Picasso's that he wanted to improve including a portrait of Igor Stravinsky and "Woman Reading (Olga)."

The West Broadway Gallery's mission is to exhibit Realism and Abstraction of the Idealized sort. Idealism offers imagery achieved through intuitively adjusted line and surface and is created entirely by the mind and hand - foregoing the camera and computer as somehow needlessly distant from the human soul. Idealists generally believe that Vermeer and Degas and Ingres and Holbein and Phidias are timeless and therefore valid today.

Neil Jenney was born in 1945 in Torrington, Connecticut. He moved to Boston in 1964 and then to New York in 1966. In February 1967, Jenney was discovered by Richard Bellamy and exhibited his paintings at Bellamy's Madison Avenue gallery along with Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman. Bellamy remained Jenney's dealer until his passing in 1998. In 1968, Jenney showed sculpture consisting of found materials organized for effect in Cologne with Rudolf Zwirner. In 1969, Jenney developed what became known as "Bad Painting" - first shown at the Whitney Biennial. In November 1970, Jenney showed his "Bad Paintings" uptown at Goldowsky Bellamy Gallery and Environmental sculpture downtown at the David Whitney Gallery. In 1971, Jenney decided that "Good Painting" was the unavoidable mutation and that the game was a race for refinement. The quest continues. www.jenneyarchivellc.com