Featuring Work By:
Katherine Bradford, Barnaby Furnas, Ellen Gallagher, Jennifer Reeves, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Bill Traylor

William Shearburn Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition entitled, Ab/Fig, curated by Wendy Cooper. The exhibition will open with a reception on Friday, November 19, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm and continue through January 15, 2011.

As a child, Wendy Cooper accompanied her mother, a medieval art historian through museums to search for hidden clues and to identify the personal styles of artists who for almost a millennium painted nothing but religious iconography. Cooper silently wondered, Why only religious iconography, for so many years? It was an oppressive context for a child of the sixties and seventies to understand. Medieval artists were financially, aesthetically and creatively bound by the mandates of their powerful patrons from the early Christian church - in order to even afford the expensive materials with which they worked.

This show is a nod to the absence of those particular constraints and a reflection on the steady shift in cultural context that artists are now free to mirror in their work. The common thread running through the exhibition are each artist's identifiable visual language of abstracting figural forms, using psychological, formal, dissociative, or historical elements to portray his or her unique style. The economics of making art disperses into survival of the fittest.

Wendy Cooper was a private dealer and curator in New York from 1985 - 1996. She owned the Wendy Cooper Gallery in Madison, WI and Chicago, IL from 1999-2007 and continues her career as a curator, private dealer and artist advisor in St. Louis where she recently relocated.

Katherine Bradford has exhibited her paintings across the US, in Massachusetts, Maine, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and in the UK. Bradford received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2006, the Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and letters and was recently a resident faculty of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and teaches at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Bradford is represented by Edward Thorp Gallery in New York. She received her MFA from the State University of New York, Purchase.

Bonnie Collura has exhibited her sculpture and drawings in NY, Minneapolis, Dallas, Washington, DC, Connecticut, Germany, India, France and UK. Collura is the recipient of many awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. She is in the forthcoming Organic Sculpture-Biomorphic Forms exhibit at the Hans Arp Museum in Remagen, Germany with Louise Bourgeois, Lee Bull, Tony Cragg, Tara Donovan, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons and Ernesto Neto. She is a professor of sculpture at Penn State University. Collura received an MFA from Yale University.

Barnaby Furnas has exhibited widely in the US and internationally at galleries and museums such as the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead in the UK, Kunsthalle Wien in Austria, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and The Royal Academy in London. He is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, and Stuart Shave/Modern Art in London.

Ellen Gallagher has exhibited her multi-media works internationally in the US, England, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, France, Spain, Italy and Norway. She is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York and Hauser and Wirth Gallery in London and Zurich.

Jeremy Kost has exhibited his photography in New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, Dallas, France, Japan and Greece. Kost has an upcoming solo at the Andy Warhol Museum and at the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands. He is represented by Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, DC.

JJ Murphy films have played at major international film festivals and have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), the Barbican Film Centre (London) and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris). He is the Professor of Film in the Department of Communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has written books on film including Me and You and Memento and Fargo, How Independent Screenplays Work and is currently working on a book on the films of Andy Warhol.

Jennifer Wynne Reeves has exhibited her paintings in New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, Mexico, Switzerland, France, Spain and Italy. She is represented by Ramis Barquet in New York and Callicoon Fine Arts, Callicoon, NY. She is also a writer and critic whose work has appeared in NY Arts Magazine.

Gerhard Richter is known throughout the US and internationally. Richter has participated in the Venice Biennale (1972, 1980, 1984, 1997 and 2007) and Documenta (1972, 1982, 1987, 1992 and 1997) and has received many prizes including the Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo, the Wolf Prize, Jerusalem, the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna and the Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel, Germany. He is represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York.

Cindy Sherman has been the subject of countless major international exhibitions most recently in the National Gallery of Iceland, Reykavik, Gagosian Gallery, Rome and Sprueth Magers, Berlin and London. Sherman will be participating in Site Santa Fe and the Gwangju Biennale, Korea in 2011 has a forthcoming solo exhibition planned at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012. Sherman is represented by Metro Pictures Gallery in New York.

Bill Traylor was a self-taught artist born into slavery on a plantation near Benton, in Lowndes County, Alabama. Considered an outsider artist, Traylor is known for his intriguing use of pattern versus flat color, a sophisticated sense of space, and the simplified figures that give his work a startlingly modernist look. Using a stick for a straightedge, he created geometric silhouettes of human and animal figures which he then filled in with pencil, colored pencil, or poster paints. His work is held in many public collections including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, with thirty-one drawings, and the High Museum of Art, with thirty-five, currently hold the largest public collections of Traylor drawings.