NYAB Event - Ben Morea “The Line Between: Ben Morea Painting of the Early ‘90’s”

Ben Morea “The Line Between: Ben Morea Painting of the Early ‘90’s”

33 Orchard

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Ben Morea is a painter, publisher, and direct action political figure. As the unseen hand of the 1960s revolutionary underground, Morea is infamous for shutting down MoMA, forcibly entering the Pentagon, occupying the Fillmore East and Columbia University, and dumping the neglected garbage of the Lower East Side into the fountains of Lincoln Square. He was the force behind the 1960s art/anarchist collective Up Against the Wall Motherfucker and and the legendary anarchist zine/broadside Black Mask.

Morea’s paintings have one foot firmly in a Suprematist camp while the other remains grounded in a playful use of composition. Traversing mid-century abstraction that utilizes basic geometric shapes and a primitive approach to mark making, and inspired by the spiritual as much as intellectual, The Line Between is comprised of work Morea made in the early 1990’s after abandoning painting for decades.

Picking up where he left off in the mid-‘60’s, Morea utilized spray paint as his primary medium to make a series of works on paper that he considers a rebirth and a continuation of his artistic explorations. The work asks the viewer to consider that there are no conclusions artistically or philosophically, but rather a series of loose answers to immediacy. Exhibiting only a few times since he began making art again, Morea had a show of paintings and graphic work from the ‘60’s with Boo-Hooray in ‘Unseen 50 Years: Paintings By Ben Morea 1964-65’ in the Summer of 2014, and an earlier Boo-Hooray exhibition of his work as a publisher, illustrator, and direct action political figure, ‘Opposition: Black Mask, Ben Morea, & U.A.W.M.F.’ in January of 2014.