Past Exhibitions at Ober Gallery

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TEXAS ARTIST ROBERT JESSUP PAINTINGS FEATURED IN THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART June 25 - July 30, 2008
Robert Jessup Baking Cookies 2007-08 Oil on Canvas 74" x 80"	Robert Jessup's paintings describe a place neither here nor there; part memory, part imagination. They are both awkward and beautiful, and they show us what we might otherwise only see with our eyes closed. That is unless you come from a place where people balance fish or teacups on their heads, or push boulders uphill while nude. With the imagination of a child and skill of a seasoned painter, Robert Jessup creates paintings that have the unique ability to both unsettle and delight us at the same time. Mr. Jessup's paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; as well as many public, private, and corporate collections.

BARBARA FRIEDMAN New York Artist April 24 - June 22, 2008
Barbara Friedman Vagabond 2002 Oil on Linen 40" x 30"	Lilly Wei, an essayist and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and is a contributing editor of Artnews writes, “The theme of disappearance and loss, time and memory is present in one way or another in all of Barbara Friedman’s paintings. Friedman, who lived—and still does, very near the site of the World Trade Center was overwhelmed at first and responded to the attack tentatively, obliquely. Lightening her palette, using colors that were pale, pastel, less bold than in previous ventures, gradually softening, then blurring the contours of her images, tempering reality, Friedman depicted scenes on the verge of dissolution, seen as if through a scrim, filtered to suggest indistinct, incomplete subjective memory”. In short, these remarkable paintings, with their Richter-like blurs, seem to exist in both the past and present. They are some of the most hauntingly beautiful paintings I have witnessed in some time. An eight-page catalogue accompanies the show.

SPRING SELECTIONS SHOW WORKS BY JOSEPH BEUYS, CARROLL DUNHAM, ELENA FIGURINA, MARY HEILMANN, GERHARD RICHTER and FRANK STELLA March 6 - April 20, 2008
Frank Bauer Die Letze Nacht des Unique Harding Meyer Untitled	Ober Gallery is pleased to present a show entitled “SPRING SELECTIONS” featuring works by artists from the Gallery collection. Highlights include a stunning painting by Russian non-conformist painter, Elena Figurina. Four new gallery acquisitions by Frank Stella, Mary Heilmann, Joseph Beuys and Litchfield County resident Carroll Dunham will be featured as well.

GALLERY SELECTIONS SHOW WORKS BY FRANK STELLA, AL HELD, ROBERT DE NIRO SR., MILTON RESNICK, GEORGE MCNEIL, PAUL RESIKA, AND ALLEN BLAGDEN December 15, 2007 - March 2, 2008
Milton Resnick Untitled 1990 Acrylic on Paper 28" x 18"	Ober Gallery is pleased to present a show entitled “Gallery Selections” featuring works by artists from New York, New England and Russia. The show features abstract works as well as landscapes. Highlights include a large painting by Valery Koshlyakov, a Russian artist featured at the 2005 Guggenheim show Russia! A large piece by Frank Stella dedicated to Joseph Beuys is also featured prominently. A beautiful piece by Al Held from 1962 will hang next to the Stella. The show will also include two beautiful watercolors by Lakeville native Allen Blagden.

TOM GOLDENBERG LEGENDARY NEW YORK LANDSCAPE PAINTER November 3 - December 2, 2007
Tom Goldenberg Gallatinville 2005-2007 Oil on Linen 40" x 60"	Hilton Kramer, the widely respected New York art critic, has described Tom Goldenberg as "one of the most accomplished painters on the current scene". In the words of Hilton Kramer, Tom brings to his landscapes a classical rather than a romantic or expressionist sensibility. He "has been drawn to the kind of terrain that lends itself to a classical order, the countryside of Dutchess County, north of Manhattan in New York State. With its carefully tended farms, rolling hills and spacious woodlands, this is anything but an untamed wilderness. If we sometimes glimpse a house or barn or some other man-made structure in these paintings, it remains subordinated to the rhythms and divisions of the land and the changing light of the seasons. "His colors can give off the sense of warm, lazy sunshine we all know from country days in August or the bright light that belies the sudden chill of fall days. They are pure evocation".

GEOFFREY DORFMAN AND MOR PIPMAN TWO NEW YORK ABSTRACT ARTISTS October 6 - November 1, 2007
Geoffrey Dorfman Newton's Pharmacy Mor Pipman Heads	Geoffrey Dorfman is an artist for whom the flame of abstract expressionism or the New York School, still burns bright. Dorfman's paintings are about painting, or the creative process. Unlike so many contemporary artists work, no narrative, irony or theory underpins his work. Dorfman, a pure painter, allows the application of paint and his own almost hyper-conscious state dictate the direction or shape a painting takes. As he says, "If the painting begins to look like something besides paint, like sky or water, I change it." Mor Pipman, a sculptor, who specializes in stone, shares a similar sensibility to Dorfman in that she allows the "process of shaping stone" determine what shape or spirit the object takes. In short, Dorfman and Pipman are linked in an artistic outlook, a viewpoint that seeks to unravel the mystery of painting by allowing the sheer process of painting and sculpting determine the final creative outcome.

SARAH PLIMPTON NEW YORK ABSTRACT PAINTER September 7 - October 4, 2007
Sarah Plimpton Time to Go 2006 Oil on Linen 30" x 36"	Sarah Plimpton has been painting for some 30 years. As a child, Sarah became interested in the inner workings of nature. This led her to study biology at Smith College and later Harvard Medical School. When she found that the questions she was beginning to ask would not be answered by science, she explored the arts. But as she freely admits, it was not until her time in Paris that she really began painting. She met the artist Tal-Coat, whose pared-down spacial abstractions significantly influenced her development as a painter. Like Kasimir Malevich, the great Russian/Ukrainian painter, Plimpton's abstract landscapes take us to another world. However, whereas Malevich's paintings are oriented in the "cosmos", Sarah's paintings seem closer to earth, as evidenced by the earth-tone colors that occupy her paintings. Plimpton describes her painting as some sort of Zen, a primitive alphabet set against a mysterious landscape, originating from her ongoing fascination with the human need and propensity to create forms. As she writes, "look around the world at some of the structures made by people with no formal schooling. There has to be some innate eye for form in the human brain. Education can ruin vision." It is no wonder that Sarah has made frequent visits to see paintings in prehistoric caves in France and aboriginal works in Australia. "From a trip to Africa in 1978, she recalls vividly how struck she was by Liberian homes with painting on mud-smeared surfaces - decoration even created by "using imprints of their hands on the walls." Sarah's paintings are quiet, but the drama that unfolds in them is quite stirring. Tension in her paintings is derived from the interplay of geometric and natural shapes, sometimes resolved, sometimes evolving. Shapes struggling, awkwardly at times, to find their place in an ever changing landscape. Her earth tones, almost prehistoric colors, re-inforce this drama by conveying a sense of timelessness and universality. She has said her goal is to take the viewer somewhere else. She does that and helps us understand that this "somewhere else" may not be far away. She is represented in many important collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscript Library.

ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY SHOW HENRI MATISSE, MILTON RESNICK AND GALLERY ARTISTS July 26 - August 16, 2007
Henri Matisse Atelier D'Artiste Milton Resnick Untitled Harding Meyer Untitled	Ober Gallery is pleased to present a show entitled “A Salon Show with Henri Matisse and…” featuring works by European, Russian, German, New England, and New York artists. The show features a beautiful crayon on paper work done by Matisse in Nice, France in 1940. Other highlights include two original works by Milton Resnick, one of the most important American abstract expressionists of the 1950s. Susan Rothenberg is featured prominently in a large woodcut piece. Two Sigmar Polke prints will also be displayed. Polke was the honored artist at the Venice Biennale this past spring.

TOM FERRARA AND COLLEEN RANDALL June 30 - July 25, 2007
Tom Ferrara Superstition Colleen Randall Inflorescence #33	Tom Ferrara was Willem de Kooning’s studio assistant for eight years, "a fact that inevitably influences any discussion of his work." Yet, in the words of Gerard Haggerty, an art critic for Artnews, "the lessons he learned from the master involve questions of attitude and commitment rather than look or style". Whereas de Kooning’s paintings tend to me more organic, Ferrara’s work is more architectural. But like De Kooning, Ferrara’s paintings evoke a "journey-like quality". But it is a journey without a clear beginning or end. The journey even seems to run in two directions, as evidenced by the outward and inward pull in his paintings. Put differently, one never really knows at what stage of the journey one is in when one enters Ferrara’s world. Like Tom Ferrara, Colleen Randall’s work is rooted in the American abstract tradition of the 1950s and 60s. Like Tom, Colleen’s paintings evoke "a journey-like quality". But whereas Tom’s painting seems more interested in investigating our journey on earth, above ground so to speak, Colleen seems more interested in taking us on a journey into the physical world we occupy. As a result, Colleen’s paintings are richly textured and the colors seem to be literally pulled from the earth.

IRA BARKOFF IMPORTANT CONNECTICUT LANDSCAPE ARTIST May 25 - June 25, 2007
Ira Barkoff Big Cloud 2006 Oil on Canvas 44" x 44"	Ira Barkoff became fascinated with landscape painting from the time his parents took to him to the Catskills in the summers, where he painted his first landscape at an early age. "When I was ten years old . . . and looking up at a blue sky with fast moving cotton ball clouds. I thought, ‘I have to remember this sky . . . remember every single cloud.’" Although not known to him at the time, the Catskill Mountains were the stamping ground of the Hudson River School of landscape painters led by Thomas Cole in the nineteenth century. It was the kind of painting that depended upon a quiet observation of fact, to be sure, but in its celebration of nature, it touched on the romantic as well. Barkoff began with a quiet observation of fact, but soon a more romantic sensibility emerged in which the expression of his ideas was based more on memory and imagination. "My landscapes," he said, "are not literal depictions of New England . . . but are distillations of visual / emotional memories." Barkoff’s influences range from Rembrandt (especially the great pen and ink drawings), to J.M.W. Turner’s late unfinished paintings, John Constable’s studies of clouds, the poetic subjectivity of Twachtman’s landscapes and Monet’s Water Lily Series, to name just a few. He admires the attitude of Caspar David Friedrich and the color of Van Gogh. Later, he embraced the gestural painting of Richard Diebenkorn and Willem Dekooning, and more recently the premier coup paintings of Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978), whose landscapes were often finished in two to four hours. Many of Barkoff’s twenty plus pictures in the Ober Gallery exhibition were painted that way, of which Shimmer, with its quick, gestural brushwork and sense of light and space, is an outstanding example -- as is The Color Purple, with its yellow foreground and Rothkoesque format and color feeling. Working in his studio in natural light, Barkoff paints to music -- usually opera, sometimes Chopin, which, he says helps put him "in the zone," to keep to his romantic point of view. The high-energy work, Tree Rows, exuding a sense of driving through the landscape at speed, was painted in those conditions, as was the large, Big Cloud, as well as Summer, the latter two recalling the work of Constable or the seventeenth century Dutch masters. Yet, despite his habit of working from imagination and memory, Barkoff’s landscapes still manage to evoke an extraordinary sense of place and if many of his landscapes are painted en premier coup, they evoke an extraordinary stability and presence. In addition, he has transformed his influences into something entirely his own. It is clearly apparent that here is a lyric artist who has created memorable images and possesses a quiet originality, quietly achieved. Essay by Richard Boyle, Art Historian

JESSE McCLOSKEY May 4 - 24, 2007
Jesse McCloskey Incident in the Park 2005 Oil on Canvas 50" x 60"	I was introduced to the work of Jesse McCloskey several years ago by Steven Harvey, the Director of Contemporary Art at New York's Salander O'Reilly Galleries. Knowing my fondness for the work of George McNeil and Paul Georges, Steven urged me to see Jesse's work. When I visited Jesse at his Williamsburg studio, I knew I was looking at work by a visionary. His landscapes explore the dark narrative of the subconscious. Dreamlike, full of provocative and disturbing images, they are reminiscent of the Surrealists. Objects such as scissors, sharp teeth, and empty liquor bottles create a foreboding. The viewer is prompted to ask, wherein the danger, why the anxiety. Yet there is a "lightness", too. Comic-like characters and lots of birds, perhaps witnesses to the crime... serve to offset the darkness. Jesse is not the first artist to embrace cartoon-like characters. Roy Lichtenstein and Carrol Dunham are only two of several American artists whose work bore the influence of cartoonagraphy, as explored this month at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When I asked Jesse about the source of his vision, he cited 18th century woodblock prints of Salem, and he also pointed to a small postcard hanging on his studio wall of an illustration of the story of "Little Red Riding Hood". "The rest..." he said " is from my dreams."

KENT ARTIST TOLLEF RUNQUIST March 30 - April 29, 2007
Tollef Runquist Untitled 2007 Latex on Canvas 48" x 48"	Ober Gallery is pleased to present paintings and works on paper by Tollef Runquist, a figurative expressionist and a native of Kent. I first encountered the work of Tollef Runquist more than ten years ago at Jacques Kaplan’s gallery in Kent. The “lines” in Tollef’s charcoal drawings had this jagged, tortured quality about them that brought to mind the work of the early twentieth century Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele. Several years later, I visited Tollef’s studio. By then one could see the influence of de Kooning and Diebenkorn in his oeuvre. Ten years later, I am pleased to showcase Tollef’s paintings in his first Connecticut solo show. I am committed to showing young talented artists like Tollef, particularly one as gifted and committed as he. Tollef’s paintings are not for the faint-hearted. They are intensely personal, honest, and hard-edged, with much to say about the human condition. I think you will agree that his paintings are hauntingly beautiful.

THE NEO-ROMANTIC GROUP February 9 - March 7, 2007
Paul Weingarten Red Clouds 1986 Oil on Canvas 48" x 36"	The artists who comprise the Neo-Romantic Group (Ivana Salander, Andrey Tamarchenko, Paul Weingarten ) are united in their allegiance to a core set of principles. Above all, they present themselves naked and true, with life as their primary celebration, honesty as their modus operandi, and a respect and reverence for the inspired masters of all ages. They present an art that rejects pseudo avant- garde fashion. The Neo-Romantics aim for a purity of expression that emanates not from intellectual theory but from pure emotion. For the Neo-Romantics, artists “do now know because they are told, they know because they experience.” Descartes said, “I think therefore I am.” The Neo-Romantics prefer “I feel therefore I live.” These artists carry out this endeavor with depth, with openness, with awe before nature, with a respect for tradition and a renewed vision of life. They employ both spontaneity and craftsmanship born of the need to represent in no uncertain terms, that which is life itself.

MATTHEW LOPAS ELEVEN PAINTINGS OFFERING A PENETRATING LOOK AT THE REALITY OF AMERICAN SUBURBAN LIFE January 2 – February 6, 2007
Matthew Lopas 12. Hays Hill Night 2005 Oil 24" x 31"	Ober Gallery is pleased to present works by Chicago born artist, Matthew Lopas. Matthew Lopas’s work brings to mind the art of Edward Hopper and Fairfield Porter. A graduate of Yale University’s prestigious M.F.A. program, where he studied with William Bailey, Lopas’s work of interiors capture the reality of American suburban life. The reception is Saturday, December 16th from 3-6 pm.

RUSSIAN ARTIST, ALEKSANDER KONSTANTINOV WIDELY CONSIDERED THE MOST IMPORTANT RUSSIAN NEO CONSTRUCTIVIST/MINIMALIST ARTIST December 14, 2006 - January 2, 2007
Aleksander Konstantinov Greece Installation	Ober Gallery is honored to present works by Russian artist, Aleksander Konstantinov. Aleksander Konstantinov is a leading Moscow artist, well known in Russia and Europe. His works are part of many major European and Russian museums and public collections, including the Pushkin Museum and State Tretyakov Gallery. His works, created in a variety of techniques from traditional drawings and fine color engravings to the newest computer technologies and industrial materials, are reminiscent of rulers, calculators, radars, bureaucratic forms and other tools of measurement and control. His style is based on strict logic, but he deliberately allows various mistakes of the system such as link omissions or breaking of the rhythm to emphasize the free and unpredictable nature of human intellect. In addition to gallery scale pieces, Konstantinov creates gigantic outdoor installations, placing his structures on facades of buildings. During the last four years he realized more than twenty such projects in countries like Austria, Greece, France, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, Russia, Ukraine, and USA. Konstantinov incorporates his gigantic “drawings” made of plastic sheets and tape into a land- or townscape breaking the boundary between real and depicted. These works carry multilayered cultural and historical associations that involve the viewer in a game of simulation and substitution of meaning. By employing interplay of cultural references Konstantinov brings irony into his gallery scale pieces and large scale installations. His works are visual jokes with a profound symbolic meaning, reflecting on our everyday life and culture. Show dates are December 14 – January 2. The reception is Saturday, December 16th from 3-6 pm.

KATHERINE BRADFORD NEW YORK/MAINE PAINTER FEATURING FIFTEEN BOAT PAINTINGS November 24 - December 14, 2006
Katherine Bradford Two Ships Burning 2006 Oil on Canvas 21" x 24"	Ober Gallery is pleased to present fifteen boat paintings by the artist Katherine Bradford. Bradford is a painter who splits her time between New York and Maine. She began as an abstract painter and gradually added images to her vocabulary. Her recent work features boats, painted singly and in groups, placed in fields of colored paint that resemble both the sea and sky. In a statement about her work, the artist writes that she "seeks to tell stories of isolation, community, questing and enchantment." Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Portland Museum. She will be having a one person show in New York this spring at the Edward Thorp Gallery in Chelsea. Ken Johnson, art critic for the New York Times recently wrote about Bradford's boat paintings describing them as "whimsical...working inventively between abstraction and representation." Show dates are November 24-December 14. The reception is Saturday, November 25 from 3-6 pm.

PAUL WEINGARTEN NEW YORK EXPRESSIONIST PAINTER AND HIS PAINTINGS OF NEW YORK AND CONNECTICUT November 4 - 23, 2006
Paul Weingarten Railroad Piers 1998 Oil on Canvas 30" x 40"	Ober Gallery is pleased to present 14 paintings by noted New York expressionist painter Paul Weingarten. The paintings draw inspiration from his New York surroundings as well as the hills and lakes of Litchfield County, Connecticut. Alfred Janson, art historian and critic, writes that “this way of painting is not for the faint of heart…No preliminary drawings or oil sketches invented in the peaceful sanctuary of the studio are permitted here; only a rawness and immediacy of brush responding instantly to the impulses of the imagination.” Paul Weingarten received his undergraduate degree from New York University in 1968. He has exhibited on numerous occasions at the Salander O’Reilly Galleries in New York City. His work is in several museums including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the High Museum in Atlanta. His work has been reviewed several times by the New York Times. Show dates are November 4 – November 23. The reception is Saturday, November 4th from 3-6 pm.

Jim Bohary New York Based Abstract Expressionist Painter October 14 - November 1, 2006
James Bohary Random Sound 1989 Oil on Canvas 63" x 67"	Ober gallery is pleased to present paintings and works on paper by Jim Bohary, a New York based Abstract Expressionist painter. The sixty-five year old painter has been painting lushly abstracted paintings for more than 30 years. A student of Philip Guston, Bohary is recognized in the New York Art world as a master of abstract expressionist painting. His paintings draw inspiration from numerous sources: New York, the beaches of Puerto Rico and Newfoundland. The result is richly textured surfaces and colors that convey layers of both memory and experience. While his work was influenced by the work of Guston, his work seems closer in spirit to the raw energy of Chaime Soutine and the buried images of Eugene Leroy. Bohary's "pursuit of expressionism" in the words of one New York art critic, "represents a new and personal experience -- no small achievement, considering its debt to modern America's first, and arguably greatest, indigenous art movement". The opening reception is Saturday, October 14, from 4-6 pm.

Tracey Jones NEW YORK ARTIST IN HER FIRST CONNECTICUT SHOW September 22 – October 12, 2006
Tracey Jones Table 10 2006 Oil on Canvas 38" x 50"	Ober Gallery is pleased to present more than 14 paintings by the seasoned New York artist, Tracey Jones, in her first Connecticut show called "Tables". Tracey Jones has pursued painting for more than three decades. Her work emerged after the emergence of “post-painterly abstraction.” While color is a major component of her work, it is the rich texture of her surfaces that holds one's attention. In the words of the noted New York critic, Robert Morgan, (contributor to Artnews, Art in America, The Village Voice and Art Press), “There is something hidden – or, I should say layered – in the intricacies of these surfaces that embodies content as something more than mere process… With a delightful touch of Dubuffet , Jones proceeds to articulate the history of Modernism in her own terms and through her own inspiration.” Show dates are September 22 – October 12. The reception is Saturday, September 23 from 4-6 pm.

Russian Art in the Twentieth Century: Then and Now September 8 – September 21, 2006
Liubov Popova Composition Gouache on Paper 1917 12 5/8" x 8 1/4"	Ober Gallery is pleased to present “Russian Art in the Twentieth Century: Then and Now,” featuring some of the most important Russian artists of the twentieth century, including two original drawings by Kazimir Malevich, and a gouache by Liubov Popova. The Popova gouache was included in a 1991 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In addition to works by Malevich and Popova, the show includes works by noted Russian artists, Eric Bulatov, Alexander Exter, Vladimir Nemukhin, Oscar Rabine, Mikhail Roginsky, Edik Schteinberg, Leonid Sokov, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Oleg Vassiliev, and Vladimir Yakovlev. Twenty-two Russian artists are included in the show. More than ten artists in the show were included in the recent Guggenheim Exhibit, "Russia!"

Eleven Contemporary Artists From Germany August 18-September 7, 2006
A.R. Penck The Colours of the Night Frank Bauer Michiko (in Hamburg) I Maia Naveriani Woman in Grass	Ober Gallery is pleased to present a show featuring thirteen paintings by eleven diverse contemporary artists living in Germany. The show includes works by: Frank Bauer is Gerhard Richter's most recognized and acclaimed student. His neo-realist portraits of people in everyday life are captured with such precision that viewers feel a part of them. Harding Meyer's powerful expressionist portraits defy sentimentality, showing children in their most human and vulnerable state. He captures their pride, aggressiveness, shyness, innocence, and dignity. Maia Naveriani's large scale, drawings of women in their most private moments are remarkable for their precision, scale and light. Werner Schmidt's naturalistic and sometimes luscious landscapes of his native Germany range from classical to romantic. Marcus Vater and Kate Waters capture the transitory moments of life, out of the belief that these arrested moments offer insights into everyday life. Marc von Criegern's paintings are highly narrative and mysterious. Marc von Criegern projects the viewer into an unknown subtly disquieting situation. Christopher Winter uses allusions to a kitschy pop version of the Hansel and Gretel story to explore what might happen as the children lose their way. Prints by the acclaimed German artists Marcus Lupertz, A.R. Penck and Sigmar Polke close out the show.