NYAB Event - “Heavy Metal” Exhibition

“Heavy Metal” Exhibition

Lori Bookstein Fine Art

This event has ended.

Lori Bookstein Fine Art presents a group exhibition of works in metal, including pieces by Stephen Antonakos, Willard Boepple, Varujan Boghosian, John Crawford, Bruce Gagnier and Louise Kruger. Encompassing a range of metallic media - aluminum, bronze, gold, iron and steel - this exhibition highlights the inherent strength, malleability and luster of metal.

Greek-born STEPHEN ANTONAKOS has been exhibiting since the late 1950s. In 2011 his extraordinary 17,000-square-meter indoor/outdoor installation “The Search” was held in Elefsina, Greece; and in that year he received Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the National Academy and the Greek America Foundation. Next spring his work will be seen in “Luminous! Dynamic! Art and Space from 1913 to Today” at The Grand Palais, Paris. His work has been exhibited internationally in over 100 one-person shows and over 250 group shows and has entered many museum and private collections in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He has installed over 50 permanent public works internationally.

WILLARD BOEPPLE was born in Bennington, Vermont in 1945, but grew up in Berkeley, California. He studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1963), the University of California at Berkeley (1963-64), RISD (1967) and CUNY City College (1968). After teaching at Bennington College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he returned to New York, where he has lived for over twenty years. He has exhibited widely here and abroad, at galleries including Acquavella, André Emmerich, Tricia Collins and Broadbent Gallery, London. His work belongs to such noted institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Storm King Art Center. In 1987, Boepple began participating in the Triangle Artists’ Workshop, an artist residency program which he has helped replicate in countries all over the world.

VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN was born in 1926 in New Britain, Connecticut, the son of Armenian immigrants. After serving three years in the Navy during World War II, Boghosian attended college under the G.I. Bill. A 1953 Fulbright Grant allowed him several years of travel and work in Italy, until he returned to America and enrolled in the Yale School of Art and Architecture to study under Josef Albers. Boghosian has exhibited extensively, showing for years at Stable Gallery and Cordier & Ekstrom. Public collections include the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hood Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. The artist, retired from a 35-year teaching career at Yale, Brown and Dartmouth, lives and continues to work in Hanover, New Hampshire.

JOHN CRAWFORD (born 1953, New York) attended the Rhode Island School of Design and was trained as a black smith in Italy. There, he apprenticed to a Tuscan blacksmith, who specialized in the production of farming tools, in a 16th-century, water-powered blacksmithing shop. He has been the subject of numerous group shows and solo shows internationally. Crawford was the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant in 1977. Public collections include the Mead Art Museum, Amhearst, MA, the National Maple Museum, VT, Queens College, New York, NY. Crawford livers and works in Brooklyn, New York, where he forges his own work.

BRUCE GAGNIER (born 1941, Williamstown, MA) studied art history at Williams College (1959-63) and went on to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1963) and Columbia University (1963-67), where he studied with Nicholas Carone, Peter Agostini and John Heliker. In 2004 he was elected Academician by the National Academy, and is the recipient of the Ingram Merril Award (1993) and the New Jersey State Council Award (1985). Gagnier’s teaching career includes positions at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence, Parsons, Haverford College and the International Schoold of Art in Umbria, Italy. Since 1979, he has been teaching drawing and sculpture at the New York Studio School. Gagnier lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

LOUISE KRUGER was born in Los Angeles in 1924. She attended Scripps College in California and the Arts Students League in New York, but three subsequent apprenticeships played a formative role in her arts education: the study of woodworking and joinery, with a ship builder in New Jersey, and traditional metal-working techniques, at foundries in Pistoia, Italy and Kumasi, Ghana. It was during her residency in Pistoia, from 1957–58, that Kruger produced many of the bronze works on exhibit. Kruger received early recognition for her woodblock prints, turning to sculpture in earnest in 1951. In 1953, she was included in the “New Talent” show at the Museum of Modern Art, and exhibited through the early 1980s at Martha Jackson Gallery, Schoelkopf Gallery, Landmark Gallery, and Condeso/ Lawler Gallery. Kruger’s works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the MoMA and the New York Public Library.