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Feb 3- Feb 24, 2024
Opening Reception
Sunday Feb 3, 2024 5pm – 7pm

The Westbeth Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of 25 paintings from 2023 by Dana Gordon.

Dana Gordon is an American abstract painter who began his art career working
as assistant to Tony Smith and George Sugarman in the late 1960s in New York. He studied painting at Brown University and Hunter College, and photography with Aaron Siskind in Chicago. He was a professor of art, mainly in the 1970s, and his avant-garde films have been featured at MoMA and internationally.

Gordon’s painting has been seen in fifteen solo shows and many group shows in New York,
Chicago, Paris, and Boca Raton, including at such galleries as Andre Zarre, Charles Cowles,
55 Mercer, and The Painting Center in Manhattan, and Sideshow in Brooklyn.

In 1974, after making three-dimensional and shaped canvases and other avant-garde
experiments for about nine years, Gordon decided to “start over”, to find his own language
of art. He put a simple white chalk mark on a piece of black paper, and let things develop
freely from there. The marks went not only toward strokes and their arrangements, lines,
outlines, and abstract or figurish shapes, but inevitably toward proto-languages, too. He
retained the use of pure color so essential to abstraction.

Gordon’s recent paintings (and writings) energize a revitalized appreciation of abstraction
and its connection with the old and the new.

Dana Gordon was one of the principal founders of The Painting Center in New York in
1993. In the same year one of his paintings was reproduced as the front cover of the Paris
Review (issue no. 129).

Gordon’s work is in many collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, M.I.T.,
Adelphi University, and the Royal Belgian Film Archive, and of Edward Albee, Virgil
Thomson, Hilton Kramer, and James Panero.

His art received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Fdn., Rauschenberg’s Change Fdn.,
and university research grants, and residencies at the Edward Albee Fdn., the Triangle Workshop,
and the Millay Colony. In 1978 he was the “runner-up” for the NEA’s US/UK Bicentennial Exchange Fellowship.

Critical acclaim for Gordon’s work has included the L.A.Times, 1978: “… for purists and
pioneers in pursuit of new perceptions.” John Russell in the NY Times in 1987 “…well
worth seeking out…a painter of whom it would be good to see more.” Helen Harrison, NY
Times, 1994: “…beautiful paintings, filled with the controlled exuberance of a carefully
orchestrated spectacle.”
Grace Glueck, NY Times, 1997: “… a very lively eyefest.” James
Panero, in the New Criterion, 2014: “While many artists paint widely, Gordon paints
deeply…. Gordon knows ‘what only painting can do.’ ” David Cohen, of Art Critical, on
Gordon’s 2018 Paris show “Lucky Paris.”

Gordon has written about art for The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The New
York Sun, Commentary, Delicious Line, The Jerusalem Post, and Painters’ Table.
Gordon says: “To paint I get into a frame of mind where I can bring everything to bear,
focused on the moment of painting. A given subject is too limiting; painting’s potency is
comprehensive and open-ended and develops its own subject, if allowed to. Abstract
form underlies all visual art; form’s content expresses intellect and feeling. Painting is as
alive as ever: after millenia why would our little era not have it, it’s a sign of life. All art
is now; in art there are no “other” cultures. My painting does not subvert, it upholds art
and reaches for beauty.”

Next to the Hudson River, in Manhattan’s West Village, The Westbeth Gallery is an
independently curated gallery run by artists living in Westbeth, a historic artist residence
in a building converted in 1970 from the Bell Telephone Laboratories and on the National
Register of Historic Places.Westbeth also houses The New School for Drama, and The Kitchen.

Home Page image: Sea of Possibility (detail) oil on canvas 64 x 72 inches 2023

More info: danagordon.art
1danagordon@gmail.com
Info: westbethgallery@gmail.com