"The Early Show" Exhibition

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

poster for "The Early Show" Exhibition

This event has ended.

Summer used to be the season when art galleries in New York made a lively selection of works and presented a
“gallery artist group show.” There would be dozens if not hundreds of such shows in midtown, uptown and
downtown as the galleries marked time before closing for the dog days of August. Now that the there is a larger
audience year-round and the art market doesn’t go on vacation, the summer season features more solo shows, historical exhibitions and ambitious thematic shows curated by artists, collectors, writers and anyone else with an interesting idea.

This summer, we are revisiting the classic gallery artist group exhibition with a twist. Each of the contemporary
artists associated with the gallery is represented in the show not with a new work plucked from our storage racks
or from their studios but one selected from an early phase of their development. The artists span a range of
generations, and we decided that “early” could be a relative term, so the artworks were made between 1969 and
1999.

The works on paper by Carl Palazzolo and Richard Kalina, and the paired sculpture and monoprint by Peter
Soriano look little like what these artists make today though anticipate their recent work in experimentation,
nuance and color, respectively. The Roy Dowell painting could be brand new but for the fact of not being a
collage. Paul Waldman, Joseph Zito, and Robin Hill continue to generate sculptures or installations with similar
materials, methods or intent as those in the show though differing in final form. The early abstractions of Harriet Korman and Stephen Westfall connect with their current geometric color and shape-based paintings, and the
figure-ground dynamics of mark, layer and structure in the paintings by Stephen Mueller, Melissa Meyer, and Jill
Moser are recognizably present in their more recent works.

Robin Lowe still paints psychological portraits on occasion but the landscape behind his gender-bending self-
portrait is more prominent today. Cindy Workman and Mary Lucier, both “digital” artists today, are represented
with works from the “analog” era. Workman’s collage depicts a female figure as her work often does today.
Lucier’s video has its roots in her pioneering work in performance and is a collaboration with choreographer
Elizabeth Streb. Denyse Thomasos, Peter Davis and Laura Larson are among the younger artists of the gallery
whose early work, naturally, is not so different than their recent work although each of them has traveled into new territory.

The exhibition doesn’t present a historical moment or trend. The eighteen works vary in scale and material and
occupy the gallery in a different way than other group shows we’ve presented. Some of the gallery’s relationships
with these artists date back decades while others are more recent, and we hope that the lively conversation among
the works in the exhibition captures something of the spirit of the gallery and its history with such a diverse group of individuals.

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