Richard Mayhew “Natural Order”
Venus over Manhattan (39 Great Jones St.)
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Venus Over Manhattan presents Richard Mayhew: Natural Order, the inaugural presentation at its new gallery space at 39 Great Jones Street. This landmark exhibition, featuring some twenty paintings and works on paper, marks the gallery’s debut exhibition with the artist, and features key loans from the collections of important supporters of Mayhew’s practice. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition, and in September the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art will open a survey of Mayhew’s work, titled “Richard Mayhew: Inner Terrain.” Venus Over Manhattan’s exhibition, organized in collaboration with ACA Galleries.
Richard Mayhew has achieved wide renown for lurid, improvisational paintings that render emotional visions of the American landscape. He is the only living member of the storied Spiral Group, a collective of African American artists including Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, and Emma Amos, who came together to in 1963 discuss their relationship to the civil rights movement and the shifting landscape of American art, culture, and politics. An artist of African American and Native American descent, Mayhew draws heavily on his relationship to his dual ancestry in his work, creating a unique visual language that explores the intersection of nature and culture, memory, and identity. Mayhew variously refers to these imagined terrains as “mindscapes”or “moodscapes,” locating his work in conversation with that of his forebears—American Tonalists George Inness and Edward Mitchell Bannister; his teachers Edwin Dickinson and Reuben Tam—as well as that of his contemporaries like Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, Ed Clark, and Emma Amos. Mayhew continues to work at 99 years old, making paintings and works on paper that push the category of landscape to the verge of total abstraction, foregoing the trappings of representation in pursuit of pure color.
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Schedule
from May 06, 2023 to June 17, 2023