Works in Progress: Artists in their 80s and 90s

Lawrence Fine Art will open "Works in Progress: Artists in their 80s and 90s" with a reception on August 20 from 6:30-9:00 pm. The group show will include work by Stan Brodsky, Paul Resika, Harriette Joffe, Athos Zacharias, Amaranth Ehrenhalt and Diana Kurz. The show concludes a series of exhibitions and presentations also called "Works in Progress."

"'Works in Progress', a season-long series of exhibitions, showcases artists pushing forward beyond already full careers," explained Gallery Director Howard Shapiro. “The art market is so hyper-contemporary today. People tend to equate contemporary with young. These artists have been creating works of superb excellence for decades and continue to do so. They remain completely relevant. They in turn continue not just to paint but to teach and mentor."

Brodsky is considered one of Long Island’s most prominent contemporary artists. For 50 years, Brodsky has created abstract works of lyrical beauty inspired by the Long Island landscape and his travels in the United States and abroad. His multilayered paintings exude dynamic energy and reveal an elegant sensitivity to color rare among his contemporaries. The artist has exhibited frequently and had a career retrospective in 2013 at the Hecksher museum. His work can be found in numerous private and museum collections.

Paul Resika (b. 1928, New York, New York) is best known for his paintings of iconic Provincetown forms. “Resika is recognized for the buoyancy of his palette and the basic shapes of his subjects, which are pared down to the simplest geometric forms—neat little houses in profiles and swishes of color that define the boats. His paintings are just a suggestion of a scene, but they are enough to spark a memory, evoke a mood, or illuminate a dream,” writes artist and critic Deborah Forman. "As a colorist – a painter who draws in color with a loaded brush – (Resika) is now without peer in his own generation, a generation that has often made color its most important pictorial interest," Hilton Kramer stated in The New York Times.

Joffe is a gallery favorite, and this will be her fourth showing at the gallery. She came to the Hamptons as a young woman in the 1960s and was befriended by all the greats of the first generation of abstract expressionism, including DeKooning, John Little, Ibrim Lassow, Philip Pavia and others. Her knew work is watercolor on yupo paper, a combination which gives the paintings an evanescent feel.

"Zach," as Athos Zacharias is called, is a Hamptons legend. He was DeKooning's very first gallery assistant in 1957 and worked for and with Elaine DeKooning, Lee Krasner and Alfonso Ossorio. A half-generation younger, nevertheless, DeKooning called him "one of us."

The final two members of "Works in Progress" are Amaranth Ehrenhalt and Diana Kurz. "We have received a powerful response to the concept from collectors and critics, but we are equally gratified that so many artists contacted us after the news got out. We have met some tremendous talent, and as a result, we included these two brilliant artists."

Ehrenhalt's work is currently on display at the Denver Museum of Art as part of the "Women of Abstract Expressionism" show along with works by Frankenthaler, Abbott, Hartigan, Krasner and others.

Ehrenhalt journeyed to Paris after the war and settled there as an expatriate artist for the next forty-odd years. Le Select Cafe was the place where artists and cognoscenti met. There she met the noted German artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, with whom she became lovers. There Ehrenhalt met Beauford Delaney and Yves Klein, among others. There she befriended Giacometti. And there she exhibited with, among others, Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis.

Diana Kurz (b. 1938) was born into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family whose business was Aryanized after the Anschluss forcing the family to flee, first to Spain, then across Europe, and finally to the United States. Brought up as a "normal" American girl, Kurz always wanted to be an artist. She studied at Brandeis, at Hunter with Robert Motherwell and received her MFA from Columbia. She received instruction from Hans Hoffmann, studied with Phillip Guston and Phillip Pearlstein and painted with Mercedes Matter. At her first exhibition at 21, her work was placed next to that of DeKooning.