Cross Contemporary Art

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Portia Munson Solo Show

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Portia  Munson  “Little  Suns,  Hollow  Bones”

 

Portia Munson‘s solo show, “Little Suns, Hollow Bones”, transforms Cross Contemporary Art into a world of flowers, plants, bones and creatures. From brilliant dandelion wallpaper on the walls to magical mandala prints of blossoms and small animal corpses, this exhibition addresses the artist’s interest in environmental issues while infusing the gallery with the spirit of spring.
     Although a conceptual extension of her 2013 “Reflecting Pool” exhibit at PPOW Gallery in New York City, Portia Munson’s upcoming “Little Suns, Hollow Bones” presents some new imagery derived from the flora and fauna of the Catskills and Hudson Valley region. Munson’s digital scanning of her subjects is a meditative exercise in organizing the chaos of nature as its elements are caught at a moment in time. Choosing flowers that bloom that day in her garden, Munson creates intricate patterns of color and form that, according to Claire Lambe in Roll magazine, “although preserved through the magic of digital technology, are as ephemeral as sand paintings,” and as a reviewer for The New Yorker stated,“(have) a seductive luminosity; each floral element appears to emit light.”
More information about Portia Munson can be found:
Artist’s website: http://portiamunson.com
New York Times Article about Portia Munson: http://bit.ly/pmccanyt
Portia Munson’s recent Public Arts Project for MTA Arts and Design: http://bit.ly/pmcca01
Portia Munson Review in Roll Online: http://bit.ly/pmcca02

About Portia Munson: Portia Munson is a visual artist who works in a variety of media including installation, painting, photography & sculpture. Solo shows include exhibitions at PPOW Gallery, Yoshii Gallery and White Columns in NYC, among others. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US, Canada & Europe in such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland; the Kunstahallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odense, Denmark; and in NYC at the New Museum, Ace Gallery, Exit Art, DC Moore Gallery and Affirmation Arts. Ms. Munson has taught at NYU, Yale School of Art, Vassar Collage and SUNY Purchase. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union and a MFA from Rutgers. Portia Munson has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Skowhegan, Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown, Art Omi, and others. Her work has been reviewed and written about in many publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Newsweek, Harper’s, USA Today, The New Yorker, Flash Art and Artforum.

Portia Munson “Little Suns, Hollow Bones” Solo Exhibition 
May 9-31, 2015
Artist Reception Saturday, May 9, 6-8pm
at Cross Contemporary Art, Saugerties, NY

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Gregory Amenoff: Selected Prints

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Gregory  Amenoff:  Selected  Prints  1983-2013

     “Gregory Amenoff: Selected Prints 1983-2013” is the first solo exhibition of woodcuts, lithographs, intaglio and monoprints in this artist’s distinguished career. The show opens with an Artist’s Reception Sat, April 11, 6-8pm at Cross Contemporary Art, Saugerties, NY.  Known primarily as a painter, Mr. Amenoff has also had a long career as a printmaker. This survey traces Mr. Amenoff’s first forays into large format color block woodcut through to his later painterly monoprints, aquatints and lithographs. Whether its painting, prints or drawings, Gregory Amenoff works in the tradition of the great American nature painters using the landscape as the inspiration for his abstract imagery. According to Rachel Rosenfield Lafo,  “Gregory Amenoff responds intuitively to stimuli in the natural world of landscape and atmosphere and the inner worlds of emotion and spirit, blending his perceptions into organically abstract images. In his work the outer world is internalized; the inner world is manifested in visible form.” For those who have followed Gregory Amenoff’s career as a painter, this exhibit will present his changes and discoveries as an artist and the influences these discoveries have had on his painting. For those new to Mr. Amenoff’s work, this show will be an exciting introduction to a great 21st century American artist.

 

About Gregory Amenoff: Gregory Amenoff’s work can be found in many important museum and public collections throughout the world including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Modern Museum of Art (MoMA), The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute Of Chicago and The Brooklyn Museum, to name but a few. Mr. Amenoff is a multiple recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Award in Painting, American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award and in 2011, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Gregory Amenoff holds the Eve and Herman Gelman chair of Visual Arts at Columbia University and received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art.  Mr. Amenoff works and lives in New York City and Ulster County, New York.

Garry Nichols “Water Witch”

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Garry  Nichols:  Water  Witch

 

Garry Nichols solo exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture opens Sat, March 7 at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY. Mr. Nichols is a prolific artist who plays with the paradox of space: what should be big is very small and what should be small, is enormous creating a fantastic distortion that torques pictorial space. The feeling of far-off lands, of maybe even the most far-off land of Nichol’s native Tasmania lends his art a sense of adventure and discovery of a new state of nature.
Garry Nichols takes over the gallery and transforms the space into an enviroment of nautical and botanical fantasy reflecting his far-ranging fascination with water divining, sailing ships, tropical plantlife and aboriginal art. Adrian Frost writes: “Nichols is now in his stride. Ultimately an epic painter, a man of the long vision, the big picture, he is intimate with painterly detail yet always pushing for the grand yet haunting vision”. Cross Contemporary Art director Jen Dragon says of Garry Nichols “Mr. Nichols is a wordless storyteller whose art follows the flow of form much as the divining rod discovers the unseen stream of subterranean water. Its exciting to surrender the gallery for an installation of such breadth and ambition!” In an interview with Guy Trebay for the NYTimes, Garry Nichols say of his own work “I have no plan when I go into the studio, I just let the drawings flow.” Just like the divining rod also known as the water-witch.

About Garry Nichols:
Garry Nichols, work can be found in many museum and public collections throughout the world including Samuel P. Harn Museum University of Florida, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Burnie Museum, University of Newcastle Australia,Osaka Hilton Hotels, Westpac Bank, ARTBank. A recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Gottlieb Foundation Awards, the artist has shown at numerous institutions including The Brooklyn Museum, Marymount Manhattan and Kean University. Most recently, Mr. Nichols’ paintings were published in “I Don’t Poem” an anthology of poetry and art edited by Claudia La Rocco. Garry Nichols currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Garry Nichols currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
More information about the artist can be found:
Video interview: http://vimeo.com/79713584
Artist’s website: http://garrynichols.com

About Cross Contemporary Art: Cross Contemporary Art is a gallery dedicated to showing mid-career and established artists who have a connection to New York City, Hudson Valley and Catskills region. Open Thurs through Mon 12-6, Tues and Wed by appointment or chance. 81 Partition st Saugerties, NY 12477 Phone Gallery Director Jen Dragon 845.399.9751 for more information

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sm_ship_spiral_by_garry_nichols_oil_on_canvas

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“Take 5” Group Show of 5 NY Artists

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Take  5:  Group  Show  of  Five  New  York  Artists

“Take 5”, at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY, opens Sat, Feb 7, 6-8pm and runs through Sunday, March 1.

This group show presents paintings, drawings and sculpture by five New York artists: John Berens, Jeffrey Bishop, Mike Cockrill, Jared Deery and Shria Toren. Despite their distinctly different styles, the artworks are uniified in that they all identify the infinite encased in the intimate. From John Berens hazy, lonely landscapes, through Shira Toren’s meandering beings, and Jeffrey Bishop’s alternate universes, to Jared Deery’s mysteriously subjective still-lives and culminating in Mike Cockrill’s reduced and deconstructed figures, the paintings and sculpture in this show capture a deep contemplation of winter.

About The Artists: John Berens: An associate professor at Parson’s, John Berens has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellwoship in Painting. Mr. Berens paintings are in numerous public collections and are described by ArtNet’s Stephen Maine as “glazey, moody”. More about the artist: http://johnberens.com

Jeffrey Bishop: Jeffrey Bishop has had numerous solo shows notably at the Danforth Museum of Art, the Miami University Art Museum and the San Diego State University Gallery. In Art in America, Matthew Kangas writes about Mr. Bishop’s abstract paintings as having a “indeterminate light source (which) sites the work on an intellectual rather than an emotional or humorous plane.” Jeffrey Bishop most recently completed the Takt Artists Residency in Berlin. More about Jeffrey Bishop: http://jeffreybishop.com

Mike Cockrill: Although some of Mike Cockrill’s artwork has generated controversy, (notably the “White Papers” with Judge Hughes and “Baby Doll Clown Killers”), the artist is also quite sentimental. His latest paintings and sculpture reference a nostalgic sense of time and the memory of suburban comfort. Anthony Haden-Guest writes about Mr. Cockrill: “The pictures (sources) that turn Mike Cockrill on are neither plunder nor cultural markers. They are his ways and means of at once re-experiencing a seemingly enchanted childhood world and decoding it. They are time machines …” More about Mike Cockrill: http://mikecockrill.com

Jared Deery: The art of Jared Deery can be characterized as both intimate and wistful with titles that evoke visual poetry. A graduate of Pratt (BFA) and Hunter College (MFA), Mr. Deery lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. More about Mr. Deery can be found: http://jareddeery.com

Shira Toren: The paintings of Shira Toren present meandering swirls of migrating forms which evoke both the flight of birds and the unconscious procession of human forms in an indistinct landscape. A graduate of Pratt Institute, Ms. Toren is an Israeli-American artist who lives and works in New York City More about Shira Toren: http://shiratoren.com

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Heather Hutchison EXTENDED thru Jan 25

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Heather Hutchison: Here Now

Heather Hutchison’s latest exhibit will continue through Sunday, January 25th at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY. Ms. Hutchison’s work explores the visual ratio of changing light over time, utilizing various transparent materials, color and form. Making the gallery walls part of her canvas, natural light forms ever-changing “paintings” as it travels though bent plexiglas forms, creating fluctuating colors and shadows. The ephemeral subject matter of all the pieces, the passage of time, is bound by one constant: light. To underline this, the artist has also created two video installations: one presented as a traditionally framed Hudson River School painting capturing sunset and moonrise at Saugerties Beach, compressing several hours into minutes, and the other utilizing the reflection of glowing embers to illuminate the gallery’s storefront window. Cindy Moore writes: “Hutchison’s paintings are impossible to experience thorough reproductions. No matter how skilled the photographer, they cannot be captured in a fixed moment. The work is responsive in a way that is alien to traditional painting: as the light shifts, so does the hue”. Maia Damianovic, describing the experience of Hutchison’s work, says: “Our gaze has no privileged or natural access, only fleeting opportunities that may be seized, in Blake’s words, “to catch joy as it flies”. And Eleanor Heartney writes in Art News: “Hutchison demonstrates that Minimalism and metaphor do not make such an odd couple after all.”

Cross Contemporary Art is open Thurs thru Mon, 12-6pm and Tues and Wed by chance or appointment.

About Heather Hutchison: Ms. Hutchison’s work can be found in many museum and public collections including The Smithsonian Institution, The Hammer Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Harvard Business School as well as Reader’s Digest, Brooklyn Union Gas and Cantor-Fitzgerald art collections. A recipient of both Pollock-Krasner and Gottlieb Foundation Awards, the artist has shown at numerous institutions including The Corcoran Gallery of Art Biennial, Montclair Art Museum and The Brooklyn Museum. She currently lives and works in Saugerties, NY.

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Richard Bosman by Eleanor Heartney

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Richard Bosman: Raw Cuts

Since he first emerged on the art scene in the early 1980s, Richard Bosman has been a master of what he terms the “ambiguous narrative”. In his early days, he was associated with the neo-expressionist movement, and gained attention and notoriety for loosely painted figural tableaux that often featured disturbing and violent scenarios – among them people drowning, brandishing weapons, and graphically perpetrating or suffering carnage. Though critics linked the works to an environment of crime and violence that surrounded New York’s East Village milieu which birthed neo expressionism, in fact, Bosman’s sources were comic books, Kung Fu and other forms of pop culture.

Today, the narratives in his works remain ambiguous, but they are quieter, and more freighted with psychological significance. While he continues to paint, he is also an accomplished printmaker. The works in this show reveal his facility with woodblock and linoleum relief. He notes that for him, painting is an additive process while printmaking is a reductive one, as he cuts away at the block to create his image. The result, as this series reveals, are simple, but potent images that encourage multiple readings. Still drawn to sources in popular culture, which he now gathers not only from films and comic books, but also from the internet, Bosman focuses here on closely cropped scenes full of foreboding, sexual tension, and unexplained anticipation. While there is no clear plot, viewers find themselves linking images to create any number of open-ended storylines. -Eleanor Heartney
Richard Bosman’s “Raw Cuts” a collection of woodcuts printed by the artist himself is on view at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties through Nov 3, 2014

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Ford Crull Solo Show

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Painter Ford Crull will have a solo show at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY opening Friday August 29 with a reception for the artist Saturday August 30 from 4-8pm . Mr. Crull, whose work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum, exhibits his latest paintings, encaustics and mixed-media drawings throughout the month of September. Included in this show is Ford Crull’s poignant encaustic series, White Rose, dedicated to the German student resistance movement against the Nazis during WWII. According to ArtNews critic Eleanor Heartney, Ford Crull’s paintings are “powerful, deeply felt” and convey a “genuine sense of mystery and wonder”. According to Mr. Crull “This mystery is where I find the real pleasure in painting. There is a beauty, simplicity and elegance in symbols, especially ones that are historically and culturally used over and over and often in different contexts with different meanings.”

Although based in New York City, Mr. Crull has long maintained a studio in Willow where many of the current artworks in the upcoming exhibit have been created. Gallery director Jen Dragon describes Mr. Crull’s exhibit at Cross Contemporary Art as an “important exhibition of a modern symbolist. Although internationally known and NYC-based, Ford Crull has always maintained a studio in the Hudson Valley and derives much of his creative energy from the quietude of the Catskills forests, mountains and streams.” Ford Crull’s solo show will be on view starting Friday August 29th and continues through September 29, 2014.

Cross Contemporary Art opens

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Cross Contemporary Art is open! Located in the same space as the recently closed Imogen Holloway Gallery, Cross Contemporary Art will continue to show paintings, sculptures, performances and installations with an emphasis on artists who work in the Hudson Valley and Catskills region. The first exhibit “Collection” is an “installation about one art collector’s aesthetic environment and the creation of the personal museum”.  Currently on view are works by various artists that include: David Chambard, Gregory Crewdson, Ford Crull, Albrecht Dürer, Antonio Frasconi, Adrian Frost, Sir Terry Frost, Brenda Goodman, Heather Hutchison, Mark Thomas Kanter, Robert Mangold, Garry Nichols, Judy Pfaff, Fionn Reilly, Rebecca Purdum, Melinda Stickney-Gibson. August hours are daily 12-7pm.  Please phone 845-399-9751 for more information. 

Curator’s Essay for “Collection”

“Collection: An Exhibition of a Personal Art Installation”
As we live, we collect and what we collect becomes our totems-reliquaries of our hopes and poignant representatives of who we are and want to be. The private art collection is an installation that becomes a personal environment. Each collector acquires objects made by others and creates a private museum.
Life events such as death or divorce can force the dismantling of a collection. The objects are no longer relevant to a lost marriage or possible in a downsized location or of interest to heirs. The attempt to connect to timelessness through art acquisition is heroic. To seek connectivity through disparate elements is an art in itself. The dispersion of a collection is natural to its life cycle as paintings and sculptures scatter again across the world to be recombined in another space and time. And a new installation is born.

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