Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of Greg Parker's minimalist paintings from September 23 to October 31. The gallery is located at 501 West 23rd Street at Tenth Avenue. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6; and Sunday from 12-5.

The beauty of Greg Parker's paintings lies in his ability to seduce the viewer with his elegance and order. Through the multi-layered manipulation of gesso, graphite and oil, Parker's painting medium exists eloquently between the boundaries of painting and drawing. He builds the painting's surface with 50 layers of sanded gesso then etches and scores expressive lines into an obsessively smooth finish. Parker's exquisite use of drawing and mark making in his paintings are the most obvious expression of both the physical and emotional unconscious. The surfaces of his paintings have a paradoxical history as well evidenced by the controlled handling of materials juxtaposed with a poetic unraveling of this order.

Parker's paintings are initially constructed in a very rational manner; both the proportions and the materials are consistent with our constructed environment. It is the artist's objective to build a specific form that ultimately becomes a contemplative environment. There is a quality of "order" and "precision" in both the composition and the mediums used . However, this sense of "order" and enforced rationality, is simultaneously abandoned as more expressive painterly issues evolve. Parker succeeds in capturing the expressive potential of light and reflected light. The highly polished planar surface allows for diverse interaction of light conditions. Graphite is applied to provide a reflective effect as well as reaffirming the objective physicality of the surface itself.

Based in Maine, Greg Parker recently had a solo exhibition at Miller Block Gallery in Boston, and has exhibited at the June Kelly Gallery in Portland and Between the Muses Gallery in Rockand, Maine. Parker was included in a major painting exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art, and in the Eighth Triennial at the Fuller Museum of Art last fall and, most recently, at The DeCordova Museum. His work is in the permanent collection of the Portland Museum of Art.

Jim Kempner Fine Art will present Changing Faces, an exhibition of contemporary portraits by Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Lucian Freud, Elizabeth Peyton, Jonathan Santlofer, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Brenda Zlamany, and others. The show, which opens June 12 and runs through July 24, will include prints, drawings, photographs and paintings. The gallery is located at 501 West 23rd Street. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6; and Sundays in June from 12-5. In a recent article about contemporary portraiture in Art on Paper, Terrie Sultan, curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, states:

"The triangulation of perception in a portrait is essential to its expressive force. Balanced among subject, artist, and viewer is the external and internal identity of a portrait. How we understand the portrait depends on how our gaze has been defined, refined, and informed by our own experience and social milieu.... In the most effective portraits, artists have factored in this ambiguous position, opening their subjects to a range of meanings even as they fix them in a specific time and place."

Through a selection of artists with diverse styles, the exhibition will explore the changing face of the traditional artistic terrain of the directed gaze in the late 20th Century. Highlights will include Large Head, the powerful etching of Leigh Bowery by Lucian Freud; and Self-Portrait I and Self-Portrait II, two new, deeply embossed relief prints on hand made paper, made with a special hydraulic press. Other artists in the exhibition include Deborah Barrett, John Currin, Andrew Ehrenwerth, Jessica Gandolf, Gianfranco Gorgoni, Alex Katz, and William Kentridge.

For further information, please contact the gallery at 212-206-6872

Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of prints by Jim Dine from the 70's through the 90's from April 22 through May 30th.

The show will include a selection of the artist's signature images including hearts, robes, tools, Venuses and flowers. Dine uses - and frequently combines- intaglio, lithography, woodcut and screenprint. The exhibition will feature several of his hand-colored prints. The gallery is located at 501 West 23rd Street at Tenth Avenue. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6; and Sundays from 12-5.

Jim Dine is recognized as one of the most important and innovative printmakers of our time. Since the early 60's, he has consistently acknowledged his robes, hearts and tools as the stand-ins of autobiography: the robe as self-portrait, the heart as a "cleaved, full object" associated with the emotions, tools as the utilitarian artifacts of his grandfather's hardware store in Cincinnati. These remain in the Dine iconography, treated as sensual physical objects or dematerialized as the symbols of Dine's private life. In the association of these themes with male and female roles, the robes, hearts and tools are the prototypes for Dine's expanded vocabulary of subjects, still characterized by their sexual references but now frequently paired or given a landscape context: trees, plants, flowers, and shells.

Jim Dine is recognized as one of the most important and innovative printmakers of our time. There will also be several of his hand-colored prints in the show.

Women in Print, an exhibition featuring prints by women artists Jennifer Bartlett, Lesley Dill, Helen Frankenthaler, Elizabeth Murray, Kiki Smith, Pat Steir, Kara Walker and others, will be at Jim Kempner Fine Art from March 6 through April 11, 1998. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6 and Sunday from 12 - 5.

The art of the print has been central to the career of many women artists.This exhibition will focus on the visual exploration through the various print media - woodcut, lithography, silkscreen, etching and aquatint. Major print workshops, including ULAE, Gemini, Tyler and Parasol Press will be represented.

Among the works in the exhibition will be Waterfall, 1988, the exquisite aquatint by Pat Steir in which the waterfall is a delicate, streaming current of light, shadow, and form; Untitled (Baby's Legs), 1990, a unique print variant printed by the artist; and Paper Under Tape, Paint over Paper by Sylvia Plimack Mangold, a splendid example of Mangold's trompe l'oeil illusionism and her insistence that the print is meant to be seen as an idea of a thing, despite the risk that it may be mistaken for the thing itself.

For further information, please contact us at (212) 206-6872.