Upcoming Exhibitions
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BERTA WALKER GALLERY Creative Couples: 1890-Present Seven Exhibitions, Two Galleries, 175 Creative Couples actors, artists, writers, filmmakers, photographers, musicians, dancers, curators FOR RELEASE: UPON RECEIPT 6/18/19 Berta Walker Gallery is celebrating its 30th Anniversary by presenting in both the Wellfleet and Provincetown galleries, a summer-long rotating group of exhibitions by Creative Couples from 1890-Present. NEXT EXHIBITIONS in Provincetown & Wellfleet PROVINCETOWN June 28 - July 20 OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, JUNE 28, 6 - 8 PM WELLFLEET June 28 - July 20 OPENING RECEPTION SATURDAY, JULY 6, 4 - 6 P M Provincetown One Couple Exhibitions: Robert Henry artist & Selina Trieff artist Carmen Cicero artist & Mary Abell writer and art historian Grace Hopkins "Patterns of Portugal" abstract photography taken in Portugal A brief introduction to this group of Creative Couples Exhibitions This exhibition is a very special celebration for Berta Walker Gallery. Not only is this the Gallery's 30th Anniversary, but it's auspicious on many other levels as well. In 1989-1990, Berta Walker had wrapped up the winter in Provincetown as Acting Director of the Fine Arts Work Center, a seven-month residency program for emerging artists & writers in Provincetown. Then a chance opportunity to open a gallery presented itself, and suddenly, its 30 years later! "Almost immediately I gave one-person exhibitions to Bob Henry & Selina Trieff. But the very first opening exhibition was a huge group show, "Going Fishing: A Tribute to our Industry", a benefit for the Portuguese Festival." Already completely scheduled for the season with Creative Couples, I THEN learned that Grace Hopkins had just returned from a vacation in Portugal. Viewing her incredible new abstract photographs made in Portugal, I of course had to add her to the celebratory season as this, then, brought the season celebrations "full-circle", offering another opportunity to again create a tribute to this year's Provincetown Portuguese Festival, June 27 - June 30. And to take this celebration one step further, Selina Trieff and Carmen Cicero were two of the first artists I represented at Graham Modern Gallery in NYC when I became Director in 1985. ROBERT HENRY & SELINA TRIEFF A Robert Henry exhibition is always an exciting adventure in paint and visual impact. He works with symbols that move from the abstract to a pulsating narrative. Both abstract and figurative, they move almost kaleidoscopically from seemingly pure abstract patterning into grounded, interactive story of the eternal human struggle and primal emotions that comprise the human drama. Art historian Eileen Kennedy observed: "Henry appears uncategorizable to me. He Robert Henry, Fun #1, May 2011 oil on canvas, 40 x 30" is an artist statesman of our age, much as Picasso was - or Goya - but he does not confront epic conflict between and within nations in the direct way that they did. He presents the human impulse to harm and heal in the emotional atmosphere, the psychic space that human turbulence creates. His more abstract works seem to me to be what so much of contemporary art is trying to express, the distillation of emotion, the spiritual and psychic space that the times we are living in have created." "Selina Trieff was a hauntingly good painter," wrote David Brody recently for Artcritical. "Each composition is a carefully calibrated balance between color surprise, dramatic stagecraft, and strong, intelligent draftsmanship." Trieff was dubbed "an American original" by New York Times art critic John Russell during her first exhibition presented by Berta at Graham Modern Gallery in NYC in 1985. Her message remains remarkably consistent, remarkably timeless. Trieff generates allusively gripping figurative compositions, abstract images in oil & gold leaf, richly pensive, introspective, strangely self-like. The subjects distilled to their essence in rich fields of color, reveal an entrenched passion for the push/pull Selina Trieff (1934-2015), Dancers with Blue, technique of painting she first learned from Hans Oil on canvas, 36 x 30" Hofmann. Trieff goes back to the same format in her work, but each return is a very different experience, an ongoing meditation of the human spirit through color and paint. "The figures are guarded, but they are also vulnerable," Trieff says. Like the artist in the harsh world of earthly experience, they are archetypal pilgrims wandering, searching for a home place. CARMEN CICERO & MARY ABELL Carmen Cicero was both a painter and jazz musician. Early Cicero was known as an abstract expressionist, but after a fire in his studio in the late 1970s, his work changed. He turned to Figurative Expressionist paintings and watercolors, unique, original, and personal, exuding the artist's personality and observations of human interaction through color and form. Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe noted in an article about Cicero's paintings at a Carmen Cicero, Leisure, 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40" recent exhibition at Provincetown Art Association and Museum: "[Cicero's] later work seems to have nothing to do with the instinctive gestures of Abstract Expressionism. It is closer to the obsessive detail and dream-lucidity of Henri Rousseau and Rene Magritte. What seems particularly significant in Cicero's art is the way he blends levels of subjectivity, accumulated experiences, dreams, and earlier art in what seems to be a reflection of the multi-faceted contemporary mind in an information age." MARY ELLEN ABELL curated and authored Edwin Dickinson in Provincetown for Dickinson's exhibition at the 2007 Provincetown Art Association and Museum, with the invaluable help of Dickinson's daughter, Helen, who wrote the catalogue raisonné on her father's work. Abell wrote two essays on Dickinson's work for the book that accompanied the traveling exhibition Dreams and Realities (2002), organized by the Albright-Knox Gallery. Abell taught art history for 25 years at Dowling College where she was given tenure in 2000. Mary's career started as an assistant at Artnews. Later she became director of Art Views lecture bureau. She earned an M.A. from NYU in 1991 and a Ph.D. from The University and Graduate Center, CUNY, in 2001. Many folk in the Provincetown art world know Mary Abell from her days a Director of Provincetown's Long Point Gallery (1987-1994). In 2012, Abell curated and wrote an essay in the catalogue for a show on the gallery at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum titled Long Point: An Artist's Place. She continues to write about art and lives side by side with her life partner, painter and jazz musician Carmen Cicero. GRACE HOPKINS "Patterns of Portugal" abstract photos mounted on steel Grace Hopkins' recent abstract photos printed on aluminum reflect the mosaic atmosphere she found in Lisbon this winter. This exhibition celebrates Provincetown's annual Portuguese Festival. Grace Hopkins has been creating photographs since 1991. She builds a highly energized visual image from a tiny piece of reality. Susan Rand Brown wrote recently in the Banner, "Hopkins is "a photographer with the eye and soul of a painter." Grace Hopkins, Portugal 35, 2019 Photograph on aluminum, 16 x 16" Charles Hawthorne praised "delicious juxtapositions of color from a common place or better yet, an ugly subject...". Grace Hopkins creates her photos sourced from such odd, dark, sometimes scary, abandoned places, and discovers magic buried within. It's as if she cannot allow decay to be left, but sees the light, texture, change - HOPE - in the darkest and ignored areas. "I feel her brushstroke in the camera's lens, making the photos personal, painterly, uniquely her own, notes Berta Walker. They are a celebration of place. Looking at them, I find I want to be inside them. They are sensual, tactile, luscious and somehow very present." Wellfleet June 29 - July 20 RECEPTION SATURDAY JULY 6, 4 - 6 PM Three-person special: Karl Knaths (1891-1971) artist Helen Weinrich pianist (1876-1978) & Agnes Weinrich (1873-1946) artist and Creative Couples: Fine Arts Work Center Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown In 2018, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown celebrated its 50th Anniversary with exhibitions in several galleries, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, MA. For 50 years FAWC has juried into the Program ten emerging Janice Redman, Ritual (Two writers and ten emerging Cups), ceramic, wool, silk, sand, artists from across the United Rob DuToit, Flowers in Studio, 8 1/2 x 10 1/2 x 5 1/2" States and Europe. 2017, Pastel and sumi ink on Courtesy of Clark Gallery, Boston paper, 22 x 18" Many singletons became couples, and still live in the Provincetown Art Colony today, including Janice Redman from England, Paul Bowen from Wales, Jim Peters straight out of the Navy, native-born Conrad Malicoat. I continue to salute the Fine Arts Work Center whose residency program brings in youth during the off-season, creating income for the Town and introducing artists to Provincetown who are living here fifty years later! The Creative Couples of FAWC celebrates some twenty FAWC Fellowship couples and many other Creative Couples who have been instrumental in founding and keeping FAWC on steady footing. Marty Davis (above), Eddies 7, The Focus Exhibition 2018, Acrylic and collage on celebrates the board, 12 x 12" & collaborative relationship Alix Ritchie Poem (below) of artists Agnes Weinrich & Karl Knaths, and Karl's wife, Helen Weinrich, a pianist. Since Karl Knaths was the first visiting artist Collaboration Gail and Michael to the Fine Arts Work Center, nurturing the first year's Mazur, Young Apple Tree, December artists throughout the season, it seemed poetic to 2003, Aquatint, etching, letterpress, ed feature him again with the Fine Arts Work Center 48/50, 22 1/2 x 12 1/2" Courtesy of Albert Merola Gallery Creative Couples Exhibition.