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GEORGE
SCHNEEMAN: Going Ape
September 12 November 4, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, September 22 from 6 8pm
Pavel Zoubok Gallery Hours: Tuesday Friday: 10am 6pm |
Saturday: 11am 6pm
531 West 26th Street, New York City NY
Pavel Zoubok Gallery is pleased to inaugurate the season with a solo
exhibition of the painter, collagist and ceramicist George Schneeman
(1934-2009). The exhibition Going Ape highlights the spontaneous
play between images and words that Schneemans collaborative style
fostered in his life and work, focusing on a series of paintings the
artist made with poet Bill Berkson (1939-2016).
In one such collaboration with Berkson, an arm with a spray can emerges
from a central black mass adorned with a peach flower, the words going
and ape scrolled above and below in fluorescent paint. Phrases
such as out of the past and chicken shit off the boards
are interwoven across the paper between small pictures and streaks of
similar vibrant colors. The work is as harmonious as it is unsettling.
In his essay included in the book Painter Among Poets: The Collaborative
Art of George Schneeman, edited by Ron Padgett (Granary Books, 2004),
Berkson writes:
My sense is that our collaborations proceeded, with participants
sometimes as numerous as three or four at time, as if in a trance. The
trance tended to favor the momentary punsteror at any rate one
who will take the lid off word or phrase and transcribe the static-y
emanations that accrue. Verbal doodling indulged, it fell to George
to unify the often contentious elements.
Collaborating since the mid-1960s with numerous poets and writers, including
Peter Schjeldahl, Ron Padgett and Anne Waldman, Schneeman also painted
on canvas, made frescos and in the 1980s began working with ceramics;
often painting portraits of the circle of poets and friends centered
around the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. Schneemans
ceramics, also on view, incorporate the same playful portraiture and
off-the-cuff nature as the rest of his oeuvre. The works in the exhibition
draw from Pop Art and its fundamental connection to language, one of
Schneemans major influences.
George Schneemans work has been exhibited since the late 1960s,
with solo exhibitions at Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, the CUE Art
Foundation, New York, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, the Istituto
Italiano di Cultura, San Francisco and most recently Poets House, New
York. His work is in numerous private and public collections, including
the Achenbach Foundation, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the National
Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, New York and UC Berkeley Art Museum, California.
He received numerous grants, including the Rosenthal Award from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the
Arts and the Fund for Poetry grant for his collaborations with poets.
This is the second solo exhibition of Schneeman's work at Pavel Zoubok
Gallery.
Gallery
Checklist of works
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