On Thursday March 29th, 2007 the Betty Cuningham Gallery will open its second exhibition of recent paintings by Philip Pearlstein. The exhibition will include nine paintings completed by Pearlstein within the last three years. There will also be a selection of watercolors.
After a brief sojourn with abstract expressionism in the 1950's, Pearlstein turned away from his contemporaries and pursued a personal vision which sent him along a very different path. Selecting the nude primarily as his vehicle to explore visual tensions, he became the master of realism for his generation.
The current exhibition of monumental paintings sustains Pearlstein's chosen signature of the nude painted from life in the studio setting. They explore the taut relationships of object and picture plane introducing combinations of folk art and ephemera to punch out these relationships in increasingly complex tensions and with a visual honesty that defies mathematical dissection.
Philip Pearlstein has been exhibiting in New York since his first solo show in 1955 at Tanager Gallery on East 10th Street. His work is now in 64 museum collections in this country, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Additionally, since the mid-1950's Pearlstein has received several awards: The National Council of Arts Administrators Visual Artist Award; The Benjamin West Clinedinst Memorial Medal, The Artists Fellowship, Inc., New York, NY; and honorary doctorate degrees from Brooklyn College, NY, Center for Creative Studies and the College of Art & Design, Detroit, MI, and New York Academy of Arts, New York, NY. He served as President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 2003 to 2006. On April 27th Philip Pearlstein will be honored with the 15th Annual History Makers Award in the field of Arts and Letters by the John Heinz Pittsburgh History Center in association with the Smithsonian Institution.
His current and upcoming shows include Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, March/April 2007, The University Art Gallery, Staller Center at Stony Brook, NY, Oct/Dec, 2007, The James A. Michener, PA, Sept – Jan ’08 and Montclair Art Museum, NJ, Fall, 2008.
The monograph: Philip Pearlstein Since 1983 was published in 2002 by Abrams with an introduction and exchange by Robert Storr.
For further information and/or image requests/catalogue, please contact the gallery at 212.242.2772 ot email at info@bettycuninghamgallery.com.
