Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of Ed Ruscha prints from the 1970’s to the present from November 2 through December 23. A selection of the artist’s drawings will also be included in the show.

Long an influential voice in postwar American painting, Ed Ruscha is also one of contemporary art’s most significant graphic artists. He began making informal editions in the late 1950’s and produced his first published lithograph in 1962. He has worked with most major print workshops in the United States and abroad, including Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Editions Alecto, Cirrus Editions, Graphicstudio, Edizione O, and Hamilton Press, to produce over three hundred prints.

Highlights of the show will include the early silkscreens News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues in which Ruscha used unconventional organic materials such as black-currant preserves and salmon roe raw egg, fruit-pie filling, chocolate syrup, axel grease and caviar in place of printing inks; the portfolio, Cameo Cuts, and The End, in which he explores the more physical properties of film as the images appear to have been scratched or sliced; and several lithographs such as “OK” and “Question?,” in which the artist employed a splatter technique used in the past in lithographs by such artists as Toulouse-Lautrec and Dubuffet, where a spray of tusche applied to the plate through a paper stencil creates a finely textured background.

Ruscha’s work has been exhibited internationally for three decades and is represented in many major museum collections. In 1999 a major traveling retrospective, Ruscha: Editions 1959-1999, originated at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and then to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL. In 2001,The California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, acquired the entire archive of Ruscha’s 325 prints and 800 working proofs.

For more information please contact us at 212-206-6872 or [email protected]

Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of prints by Wayne Thiebaud from November 1st through December 8, 2001. The show will include a selection of some of the artist’s best etchings, aquatints, linocuts and woodcuts from 1962 to the present. The gallery is located at 501 West 23rd Street. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6.

Celebrated for his carefully observed images of cakes, pies, toys and lipsticks, Wayne Thiebaud’s prints have been an important part of the artist’s oeuvre since the early 1964 “Delights” portfolio of tiny incisive etchings of commonplace American still-life objects - a restaurant tabletop dispensers, a plate of olives, a display of stately cake wedges, a can of sardines. Later images of rabbits and lollipops were followed by San Francisco cityscapes like “Steep Street” in which the city’s verticality is extended into flat pattern. In his etchings and aquatints, such as the stunning “Four Cakes,” and the extraordinary Japanese woodcuts like the darkly luminous “Candy Apples,” Thiebaud gives weight and presence to passing pleasures and to ephemeral qualities of light and shadow.

There was a retrospective of Wayne Thiebaud’s prints at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. earlier this year. The Whitney Museum in New York and The Phillips Collection in Washington had major retrospectives of his paintings and drawings this year as well.

For more information please contact us at 212-206-6872 or [email protected]

Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent drawings by Jay Kelly from September 15 to October 20. Executed in pastel and graphite on vellum, these small, seductive minimalist works are subtle distillations of pure geometric forms. This will be the artist's second solo show at the gallery. Jim Kempner Fine Art is located at 501 West 23rd Street (entrance at Tenth Avenue). Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6; and by appointment.

In his second solo show at Jim Kempner Fine Art, Kelly continues to investigate modes of abstraction, a process he began approximately four years ago in what seemed a significant departure from the photorealism of his previous paintings and watercolors of industrial sites. However, with his luminous new drawings -- sleek, silvery graphite and muted pastels on translucent vellum -- what he is doing is "simplifying and concentrating, eliminating the unnecessary, as Hans Hoffman once suggested, rather than exchanging representation for abstraction. His most recent sequence of postcard size images (3" x 6" or 5" x 5") floated on a white ground, situates his imagery in less fixed, more ambiguous territory where scale is relative -- a quarter inch might equal the universe--and space is equivocal. Many of the drawings are diptychs, a monochrome panel sometimes crossed by the thinnest of lines paired with a panel containing a few geometric figures -- circular and oval rings, open squares and rectangles, a stream of dashes -- that appear to overlap and are slightly out-of-focus at the edges. The imagery, still representational as well as abstract, evokes formalist ghosts as well as biological, cosmological or encoded, electronic phenomena, precise within an imprecise field. Kelly's measured, sensitized drawings comment on the ideologies and aesthetics of modernism, postmodernism and beyond. Small miracles of form, color and light, they also comment persuasively on the subtleties and pleasures of perception (Lilly Wei, 2001)."

Jay Kelly has exhibited at Graystone Gallery in San Francisco and at O.K. Harris in New York. Examples of his new work have recently been acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The British Museum, and the noted Minimalist drawing collector, Werner Kramarsky.

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

Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Minimalennialism, a large group show of 21st Century Minimalist paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture by over 15 artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Jay Kelly, Sol Lewitt, Julia Mangold, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Wes Mills, Greg Parker, Carole Seborovski and others. The dates of the show are March 31 through May 5, 2001. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 31 from 6-8 pm. The gallery is located at 501 West 23rd Street (entrance on Tenth Avenue). Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6, and Sunday by appointment.

Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, formally reductive abstraction was employed by a range of artists who worked with similar vocabularies, but to radically different ends. Many artists working today continue the exploration of simplified form and color, the repetition of elements, objectifying the painting as object, and the universal "purity" of spirit of the minimalist esthetic.

Highlights by younger artists include the small, seductive minimalist drawings by Jay Kelly executed in pastel and graphite on vellum; the more austere grid and geometric form paintings by Greg Parker done in oil, pigment and graphite; the spare, poetic paintings and drawings by Wes Mills; and the severe steel sculptures by Greg Corn and Julia Mangold.

Featured works among the "minimalist masters" are Ellsworth Kelly's recent prints of boldly colored simplified curves published by Gemini; a set of seven small woodcuts by Robert Mangold, which accompany his recently editioned catalogue raisonne published by Parasol Press; and a charcoal grey and orange curvilinear drawing by Sol Lewitt.

Jim Kempner is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent prints and unique works on paper by Charlie Hewitt from June 2 through July 7. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 2 from 6-8 pm. The gallery is located at 501 West 23rd Street (entrance on Tenth Avenue). Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6, and Sunday by appointment.

Charlie Hewitt’s recent prints and paintings are physical, complex and layered, yet elegant and restrained. Hewitt has a strong graphic sensibility along with a poetic visual language. A painterly approach is apparent in these works, infusing the surface with evidence of the artist’s hand.

Featured in the exhibit will be “Grass Harp” 1, 2 & 3, a tour-de-force of aquatint, etching, and drypoint. “Grass Harp” is a richly colored, boldly rendered triptych that references nature as a celebration of life. The exhibition will include the original working drawings executed in oil, varnish, drypoint and collage.

This past year, the Whitney Museum acquired two major Hewitt prints for their collection: the large-scale, colorful “German Music I”, and the extraordinary drypoint “Heartland”.

For more information please contact us at 212-206-6872 or [email protected]

Jim Kempner Fine Art is delighted to announce an exhibition of unique color trial proofs by Sam Francis, one of the most gifted graphic artists of the abstract expressionists, as well as one of the most committed to the art of printmaking. The exhibition will include about 30 of these special proofs, all of which were made and signed at the same time as the editioned prints, but have remained relatively unknown. Many of the trial proofs in the exhibition were created at the Litho Shop, Sam Francis's own print shop, which he established in 1970. All were acquired directly from the artist's estate.

Sam Francis made over 300 lithographs, 20 screenprints and 125 etchings from 1960 to 1990. For each editioned print, Francis explored the full range of aesthetic possibilities in his trial proofs and imbued them with their own special qualities. Experimentation was an integral part of Francis's creative process and the trial proofs are considered to be equally resolved and successful in their own right.

The dates of the exhibition are February 8 through March 17. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, February 10 from 5-7 pm. The gallery is located at 501 West 23rd Street at Tenth Avenue. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6.

For more information please contact us at 212-206-6872.