Richmond Burton:
The Past is Prologue
May 1-31, 2024
One wonders if, when Shakespeare penned the line indicating that The Past is Prologue, he could have predicted the relevance of his words time and time again as they have passed through history.
For Richmond Burton, they started early, in fact on the day of his birth, when then Senator John F. Kennedy referenced them in a campaign speech at Phoenix, Arizona. Today, they reflect on the work for this exhibition in which Burton has taken earlier paintings and reworked them, thus using the past to reinterpret the present and perhaps the future.
Long known as a fixture in the New York School of abstract painting, Richmond first entered the art wold working as an architect in the offices of I. M. Pei where, among other projects, he was instrumental in the production of the now legendary pyramids outside the Louvre in Paris.
Richmond’s painting career has had many highlights. Shown early by Mario Diacono and Postmasters Gallery, he became the first one-person exhibition at the nascent Matthew Marks Gallery and for years showed prominently at legendary Cheim and Read Gallery. His work is included in most major New York museum collections and in important private collections around the world.
The Past is Prologue opens with a public reception on Thursday May 2, 2024 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at BravinLee Programs, #211, 505-526 W. 26th Street, New York and continues through Friday May 31st.
July 9 -July 19, 2024
For the past three decades Erik Spehn has found a multiplicity of ways to add and remove paint from the surfaces of his paintings. His early work in the mid-nineties utilized built up surfaces, one thinks of de Kooning. Then there were mandelas where paint was applied, allowed to partially dry, and then washed away leaving ridges of acrylic to define the shapes and create an aura of the missing paint. Then grids, the paint built up utilizing layer upon layer of tape - tape added, subtracted, reasserted and once again removed with layer of paint between every motion. The grids were solid at times, free flowing at others, and, on occasion, almost destroyed.
Which brings us to the paintings in this exhibition. The background paint is applied, and then, here the transformed grid reappears, with the subsequent additions, the spirit of the work, added with a brush type applicator of the artist’s own invention.
Perhaps these descriptions of process leave one think “ho-hum.” But never has Spehn’s been ordinary. His recent work sings. It is almost always said that one has to see art in the flesh to really understand, to truly see it. That is not always true, but it is manifest in these Meditations.
Erik Spehn
Rafael Ferrer
September 2024
Work images coming soon.
Keith Morrison
November 2024