NYAB Event - Geoffrey Moss “Inappropriate Appropriations”

Geoffrey Moss “Inappropriate Appropriations”

Studio Vendome

This event has ended.

Antonio “Nino” Vendome, chairman of the Vendome Group, has announced the simultaneous opening of two new art galleries located in West SoHo’s burgeoning Hudson Square district. The first gallery, Studio Vendome, is located in architect Philip Johnson’s Urban Glass House at 330 Spring Street. The second gallery, Studio Vendome Projects, is located at 30 Grand Street across from The James hotel.

The first exhibition will be unveiled on September 10, 2013 and run through Oct 12th. “Inappropriate Appropriations” by Geoffrey Moss is a compelling body of work representing the artist’s most private and unseen paintings. This series uses as its reference point the classic erotica imagery of Japanese shunga painting found in ukiyo-e color woodblock prints of the 17th and 18th centuries, a subject with which he first became familiar while working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I wanted to give this Japanese subject an American character…It’s a process of distillation in many steps” until the erotic image becomes abstracted yet still bearing a subliminal seduction. Studio Vendome will present 12 oils on canvas plus 8 works on paper in mixed mediums while Studio Vendome Projects will present 15 smaller format works on paper.

Geoffrey Moss has led double lives for fifty years. The public knows him for his instantly recognizable style of searing political cartoons that appeared in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post for decades. He was nominated two times for the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most sought-after illustrators in the country. No one knows that successful career was paralleled by his secret life as a brilliant abstract painter. In 1964, when he and his fellow students (who included Rackstraw Downes, Janet Fish, Brice Marden, and Richard Serra) graduated from Yale’s MFA program, Moss remained stubbornly independent and avoided exhibiting his paintings. When he met Peter Hastings Falk, the curator of this exhibition and founder of Rediscovered Masters, he was convinced otherwise. Falk points out that while Moss may have been pigeon-holed as an illustrator he stands firmly on equal footing with the best of the abstract painters of any generation.

The galleries of Studio Vendome are unique in that their exhibitions will showcase late career artists and artist estate collections deserving greater critical recognition. The shows are part of the unprecedented “Rediscovered Masters” series, whose artists are elected by an Art Advisory Board composed of distinguished museum directors, curators, historians, and critics. Falk, also a noted art historian and art reference publisher, has planned the next ten art exhibitions for Studio Vendome, some of which first showed at art museums and non-profit art centers from across the country.

Mr. Vendome’s vision for approaching the art world in a different way came during the 1980s and 1990s owing to his close professional relationship with Philip Johnson, the great modernist American architect. The Manhattan real estate developer explained, “Philip Johnson designed the critically acclaimed ‘Habitable Sculpture’ which I intend to build one day to continue his legacy and establish the true value of architecture as art, which will highlight Johnson’s lasting impact on the American landscape.” Vendome’s overarching initiative is therefore to present visually compelling exhibitions for both galleries.

Vendome is also affectionately known for his “Nino’s Restaurant 9/11 Relief Fund” where he transformed his family restaurant in to a relief center for first responders and others at the World Trade Center site where he served tens of thousands of free meals to Ground Zero workers for seven months following 9/11.