Cleve Gray (American, 1918-2004), Dispersal of the Square #9, 2003, mixed media on canvas, 52 x 60 inches. Courtesy Estate of the Artist
Cleve Gray (American, 1918-2004), Conjunction #1 (The Egg), 1975, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 32 inches. Collection Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York
Cleve Gray (American, 1918-2004), Untitled, 2004, mixed media on canvas, 80 x 55 inches. Courtesy Estate of the Artist
Cleve Gray: Man and Nature – Boca Raton Museum of Art
The Boca Raton Museum of Art delves into the realm of man and nature with the opening of the comprehensive exhibition Cleve Gray: Man and Nature, opening March 17, 2009. The exhibition will run through May 31, 2009
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This extensive retrospective of noted American painter Cleve Gray (1918-2004) presentsmore than 32 abstract paintings completed between 1975 and 2004. Viewers canexperience the full evolution of Gray’s work as he developed his signature gestural,color-based abstraction.
Gray’s style was first influenced by Abstract Expressionism, and later drew influence andinspiration from such sources as Chinese calligraphy, Hawaiian waterfalls and Greeksculpture. A working artist until the end, Gray was still creating monumental canvassesat the age of 86, when he passed away in 2004. His work has been recognized as areflection of the natural world and human response to what is experienced in that world.“Throughout this evolution, man and nature struggle for dominance; Gray treads theboundaries between painting conceived as evidence of the artist’s will and as evidenceof his unwilled responses to the natural world, between painting as a product of ‘culture’and as an equivalent for forces beyond our control,” wrote Karen Wilkin, curator for theshow, in her exhibition catalogue.
As a student at Princeton in the 1930s, Gray received formal training in art andarcheology and wrote his thesis on Chinese landscape painting. After graduating fromPrinceton, he joined the Army. As a soldier in post-World War II Paris, Gray beganinformal studies with the French artist André Lhote and studied cubism as a student ofJacques Villon, brother of Marcel Duchamp. Inspired in the 1960s by artists like JacksonPollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, Gray began to producelarge paintings using a variety of application methods – pouring, staining, sponging andother nontraditional techniques – to create compositions combining expanses of purecolor and spontaneous calligraphic gestures.
Cleve Gray: Man and Nature includes works from public and private collections and hasbeen curated by Karen Wilkin, art historian and critic. The exhibition was organized bythe Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, and wasfunded, in part, by The New York State Council for the Arts, a State agency; the Friendsof the Neuberger Museum of Art; and the Westchester Arts Council.
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