July 23 - August 11 2021

LARRY COLLINS | JACKIE LIPTON

Opening: Friday, July 23 (8-10 masked people at a time)

Larry Collins | Pandemic Drawings + Book Launch

David Carrino writes:

He [Larry Collins] didn’t decide in advance which of his possessions he was going to draw; there were no hierarchies in terms of utilitarian objects versus some of the fine art or antiques he’s collected over the years. Nothing was chosen for its symbolic or sentimental associations. Why spend days drawing the glass of water, but not the toothbrush? Why draw the Christmas cactus, but not the fin de siècle Egyptian Revival stained glass lamp? He drew each thing as if he was seeing it for the first time; in isolation, all he saw was form, volume, light and shadow. He wouldn’t pick the next object until the previous drawing was completed. Then he would scan the room, waiting for the next thing to “jump out at me.”

Larry Collins was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1945 and raised in Del City, Oklahoma. His artistic career began at age 17 when Dorothy Miller, former curator at MoMA in New York, selected one of his abstract paintings for an important regional exhibition at the Oklahoma Art Center. After receiving his BFA from the University of Oklahoma in 1967 he was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. During the war he served as an infantryman and a combat illustrator.

Collins received his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1980. He has exhibited internationally, and his paintings, drawings, photographs, and artist's books are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, International Center of Photography, New York Public Library, Sheldon Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, Worcester Art Museum, PAAM, Amarillo Museum of Art, and others. He has collaborated on limited-edition books with poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Eileen Myles.

In 2010 he was honored with a career retrospective exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, "Larry R. Collins: Finding Light.” In 2017 the Amarillo Museum of Art presented a retrospective exhibition of his Vietnam War photography and paintings.

Jackie Lipton | Communication & Courage, Paintings

Jackie Lipton’s paintings are vibrant, dynamic and immersive. Her variable marks and curious forms, and the ways in which her textures, treatments and layers obscure, peer through, and seep into and over one another, pull viewers in and lure them along. One sees Lipton’s paintings as somehow more than just painted, and rightly so. Her works, emerging from a place of courage, are intensely, visibly wrought. And on several deeper levels, her immersive works are themselves immersed in thought.

Thought is indeed a crucial component of Lipton’s art, whether it’s of the sort of that explains things or calms us down, or that stokes our emotions or confounds. Through vivid colors, stark contrasts, textured strata and sometimes florid, sometimes slashing marks, Lipton channels the energetic churn of her opinions and passions regarding society and sanity, politics and equality, gender and diversity, and the potential for abstract paintings to effectively comment on – or feature marks in response to – any such matters. In certain works, Lipton discretely invites her viewers to question these things along with her by way of embedded, elusive, snipped, or only partially revealed texts. As the artist herself notes:

“My art acknowledges that the inner life has tremendous power to exert on the external world. It is about feeling and trust. It is a demonstration of the forces of the inner life and the imagination, of courage. It has energy and power. It has complexity, and it has simplicity – much like people do, too.”

Lipton’s creative drives have made her a painter, and her life experiences as an artist and human being have led her to make paintings to unravel tensions, abate anxieties, counteract chaos, and defuse confusion. Frenetic energies might factor into and remain apparent in her abstract compositions, but her works are purposefully composed, and at rest as such. It is in these places of pause, these moments of painted calm, where Lipton finds the language and courage to both commune and communicate with her audience.

– Paul D’Agostino

Jackie Lipton is a painter living and working in New York City. In addition to exhibiting at AMP Gallery and Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA, she has exhibited in many venues in New York and elsewhere, including shows at ARC at the Whitney Museum, the Art Resources Center of the Whitney Museum, the Aldrich Museum, Condeso/Lawler Gallery, WARM Gallery, the Art Resources Transfer Gallery, Gale/Martin Gallery, Gallery Boreas, Corinne Robbins Gallery, Life on Mars Gallery, and Westbeth Gallery.

Lipton has received grants and awards from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, NYFA, and NYFAI, among others. Her fellowships and residencies include the MacDowell Colony, the Cummington Community of the Arts, and the Virginia Center for Creative Art. She was also awarded a grant toward a residency program in Reykjavik, Iceland, through Gallery Boreas.

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