7 ABSTRACT PAINTERS.
Anne Brody, Tony Candido, Patricia Hacker, Robert Ludwig, Jean Promutico, Ellen Rosen, Parviz Mohassel, curator

WESTBETH GALLERY TO FEATURE
WESTBETH ABSTRACT PAINTERS GROUP – WAPG

7 ABSTRACT PAINTERS.
September 7 – 29, 2019

West Village, New York City. Westbeth Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of work by the artists of the recently formed Westbeth Abstract Painters Group (WAPG), curated by Parviz Mohassel. This exhibition includes WAPG members’ early and recent paintings.

Artists:
Anne Brody, Tony Candido, Patricia Hacker, Robert Ludwig, Parviz Mohassel, Jean Promutico, and Ellen Rosen.

While WAPG members demonstrate ties to abstract expressionism and constructivism,they have clearly developed their own individual sensibilities and voices. The work exhibited encompasses a range of approaches, from Candido’s abstract brush strokes; Brody and Hacker’s natural, more linear color movement; Mohassel’s bold, gestural
compositions; Ludwig’s geometric compositions to Promutico and Rosen’s layered, contemplative paintings.

WHAT: 7 Abstract Painters.
WHO: Anne Brody, Tony Candido, Patricia Hacker, Robert Ludwig,
Parviz Mohassel, Jean Promutico, Ellen Rosen.

WHEN: Opening ReceptionSaturday September 7, 2019 from 5 to 7pm

Exhibition Continues through Sunday September 29, 2019

Gallery Hours
Open Daily, 1pm to 6pm
WHERE: Westbeth Gallery

57 Bethune Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTACT: Parviz Mohassel RA Ph.D., curator
Mohasselstudio@gmail.com, 212.206.9722

ARTISTS:

Parviz Mohassel, RA Ph.D., curator

My paintings are NOT about empty blank canvases which lack objective representations. They are about full compositional structures and forms. They leave open a pivotal connectivity to a compelling range of unpredictability on the canvas itself, and the fast paced of the City life. This openness is created without thematization, with black and white and gestural color brush strokes—in the shifting spontaneous planes of the canvas.

I do not believe in organizational re-positioning of elements. But to provide spatial structural compositions activating spatial variations and by reorienting of canvas, I often employ to change my focal point and thus to search for what is hidden in-between the unseen and seen and the broad brush strokes.

In the dichotomy of open, close, accessible, and hidden, in using broad and lighter brush strokes there is a beginning which is put first–something that is not pre-determent, pre-meditated and figurative. This beginning is with the importance of starting fresh from a clean slate, both in mind and on the canvas. This is prior to anything else, and perhaps with the smallest forward looking insight, I speak to the events of present time: like painting in abstraction, one must start fresh from the start.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a catalogue of Mohassel’s work will be available and will include essays by Edward Casey, Mary Rawlinson, James Dodd, David Kleinberg-Levin and other philosophers on the phenomenology of aesthetics, responding to the question, “What is abstract painting? ”

Anne Brody
For as long as I can remember, I have been involved with the study, the observation, and the creation of art. As a young person I lived in Japan, where I learned to appreciate the Asian aesthetic. Studying color and drawing with Josef Albers was inspirational. It gave me my first opportunity to discover my special sensitivity to color and also to create my first original artwork. I fell in love with paint—the purity of the color, the texture, and the pleasure of applying the paint to the canvas until the final stroke.

For the past several years I have spent most of my summers in a country setting. For the first time I truly discovered the changing seasons, the mystery of a garden, the beauty of a small river. The variety of colors and textures were overwhelming and so I decided to simplify my work. Now I used a pencil to describe what I was seeing. Initially, I drew from nature, but found that to be a totally frustrating experience. When I began to experiment in my studio with my pencil and discovered the variety of tone and texture, I felt more satisfied. Each drawing is an experiment in form and space. I have found much satisfaction in my pencil and hope this is conveyed to the viewer.

Nature is the inspiration. I am the catalyst. The drawings are the end result. The act of drawing the repetitive forms is a meditation. The final works are a combination of tone and texture, which reflect my perception of the natural world. The paintings are inner landscapes.

Tony Candido
I would consider my first mature or important paintings the Night Paintings, and the twelve or so paintings that preceded them. These paintings, completed between 1954 and 1956, have always been important to me. In them I am dealing with the human image—the concrete substantive image of man. But when one sees the paintings very abstractly, they are a plastic realization of a human image and that human image is not relegated to the world we live in. That’s a very complicated statement, somewhat paradoxical. But I can’t help it; I can’t say it any other way.

For me the brush stroke is the concrete formative element, which in a direct hand-to-mind action plastically activates the space of the painting, through which a reality far greater than the apparent is realized. The technique of brush and ink suits my sensibility. I can, in effect, carve out large spaces with one sweeping stroke. A combination of grace and strength are available within the range. I see a profound meaning and mystery in the stroke. For me, looking into the stroke and seizing its action promotes an alertness and a clearness of mind which is unexplainable, and herein lies the way to unimaginable leaps and transformations.

When painting either abstractions or heads, the scale and quality of the space is a plastic component of the paintings—it bears content. The stroke is space as well as the track of the images in space. Figuratively, one might well imagine the stroke as being the historical-universal path of the image in time—hence the true expression both ancient and now, the now always moving ahead.

Patricia Hacker
“I create a sensation of movement and depth…My paintings suggest forms colliding and flying apart, yet frozen in time and held together by an innate sense of balance.” (NYArt Beat Interview) My primary and preferred painting mediums are oil, watercolor and acrylic.

Bob Ludwig
Although most of my work is abstract, I was never an abstract expressionist; nor, indeed, have I ever identified with a specific artistic movement. My work was never minimal, but I always strive for clarity and simplicity. In most of my recent work I make simple horizontal and vertical divisions. Using various media — charcoal, paint, pastels, graphite — I fill the resultant rectangles with color that is often muted. The efficacy of the painting derives from the precision of the tonal – spatial relationships. The various degrees of texture and tone establish ambiguities between flatness and the appearance of depth, and stasis and the illusion of incipient motion. I aim to create an optical ambiguity between open and closed spaces and to engage the viewer in this delicate balance.

Jean Promutico
With a regard for the materiality of the flat painting surface whether paper, canvas or panel — is where I begin.
And this begins the process that describes my personal vision which is realized essentially through my eyes, gestures and color. The brain kicks in through these elements which are not predetermined. My immediate approach is reckless in its gestures/brushmarks and color. Ultimately however I want a manifestation of a beauty, sometimes gritty, that is evocative of atmosphere/nature not coming from the mind but of the spirit and heart – thus a need to refine what is.
I wish the final statement to be transcendent/contemplative.

Ellen Rosen
My paintings are wordless visual statements that exist between silence and space. Wishing to set a visual presence I create an atmosphere to which viewers can bring their feelings and experiences. Essentially gestural, the smaller brush strokes, which are my personal mark, combine to create large, rectangular form. When confronting a blank canvas I look at it until I discover the forms are buried between the edges and begin to bring them out. The process of painting becomes constructive and destructive, at once additive and reductive, continually changing, continually creating something different, the rectangles moving forward and back until the tension is resolved and the painting works. My paintings are about color, space, formal tension and balance. They reflect my personal history and the path I have been traveling. I experience this process, which always begins with struggle, as both cathartic and liberating. My work is essentially meaningless. It tells no story. If there is content, it is only about the work itself.

WAPG Statement (Founded on November 2016)
Westbeth Abstract Painters Group was formed to promote abstract experimentation and encourage open dialogue between artists. WAPG considers abstract art and painting as a discipline, complete, non-symbolic, with compositional and gestural embodiments–free from representing object directly or indirectly. As such, abstract painting is not a suggestion of mere lines, color fields, forms and a simple organization of distinct elements. Rather, WAPG acknowledges multiplicity, change, intuitiveness and the formal variations in composition, by avoiding direct copying from nature.

In addition to gallery exhibitions WAPG hosts talks on abstract painting contribution to the understanding of abstract art and practice.

Westbeth Gallery
57 Bethune Street, New York, NY 10014
Open Daily 1PM – 6PM

Contact
Parviz Mohassel mohasselstudio@gmail.com
212.206.9722