GREGORY AMENOFF: Facing North
EXTENDED THROUGH JUNE 15, 2007

The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Gregory Amenoff. This show will include more than twenty new paintings and will be the gallery’s first show of Amenoff’s work. An illustrated catalogue with text by Trevor Winkfield will be available.

Amenoff’s work is rooted in the long tradition of landscape painting. These are not paintings of specific observed sites; instead the psychic possibilities of imagined places are described. The viewpoint is of an implied figure looking into a highly imagined world. The world is described in terms of light and atmosphere with a sometimes ecstatic intention. The curator Rachel Lafo, has written, “In his work the outer world is internalized; the inner world is manifested in visible form.”

Bodies of water (often the sea), mountains, and other rocky and imagined protuberances— places where violent tectonic action has occurred—often describe spatial experience. Also present are highly structural foregrounded shapes—faceted forms that muscularly twist their way through and into the pictorial space. These objects of vernacular architecture insert themselves into sublime landscapes acting as vehicles of bisecting aggression. Trevor Winkfield writes in his essay, “A roiling synaesthesia results, one in which animal becomes vegetable, and this in turn solidifies into mineral. Nothing is settled, everything heaves. The checkered snail in the foreground could also be a root, and the slate slab it lurks behind is more likely to be a watery inlet. Nocturnal tones co-exist with buttered sunlight … or are those streaks a loaf of honey lodged in amber?”

Gregory Amenoff (b. 1948) is a painter who lives in New York and New Mexico. He is the recipient of numerous awards from organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and Tiffany Foundation. He has had over fifty one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in the permanent collections of more than thirty museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He served as President of the National Academy of Design from 2001-2005. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Cue Art Foundation and as the Foundation Curator Governor. Amenoff has taught at Columbia for the last fifteen years, where he holds the Eve and Herman Gelman Chair of Visual Arts.

For further information and/or images contact Ellen Robinson at 212-755-2828 or at .