THE PARK: PAINTINGS BY ERIK BENSON
ON VIEW IN THE ARSENAL GALLERY
May 2 – June 20, 2013
 
The City of New York Parks & Recreation, in partnership with Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, is pleased to announce the exhibition, The Park, by Erik Benson. This new series of paintings, created with thousands of shapes hand-cut from dried sheets of acrylic paint, depict colorful but eerily abandoned playgrounds in stark urban landscapes. Drawings from this series, as well as a stop-motion video documenting Benson’s unique painting method are also on view. These exquisite compositions of urban landscape will be exhibited in the Arsenal Gallery from May 2 through June 20.
 
Benson, known for his austere cityscapes, uses his intensive compositional technique to capture the interplay of construction and creative destruction, urban density, abandonment and open space in images that that have elements of decay and hope. The Park focuses on his interest in playgrounds, which are void of inhabitants but enticingly geometric and colorful. He first began to study these spaces in early graduate work at the Rhode Island School of Design, and was particularly interested in the play structures’ boldly unnatural and manmade coloring. The jungle gyms appear to sit on top of the surface rather than integrating with the landscape—a metaphor for his own painting techniques.
 
“Originally I was interested in creating a painting vocabulary that depicted the plasticity and temporality of unexamined things such as playgrounds and construction sites,” says Benson. “These interests have been growing into ideas and concerns that deal with the urban landscape, such as how cities grow and shrink, and what these issues mean to the inhabitants.” In these new paintings, Benson considers how playgrounds and parks play a role in the community and surrounding neighborhoods that are oftentimes blighted. These oases of saturated color and abstraction provide a much needed escape from the daily grind. These playgrounds are strikingly familiar, and while they are inspired by the play spaces around Benson’s neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn, they are not exact representations. In fact their archetypal structure can be found in neighborhoods throughout the country.
 
Benson’s paintings are in equal measure foreboding and optimistic and cause us to question the nature of urban development. Gallery owner Edward Tyler Nahem was impressed by “Erik’s clear-eyed view of the intersections of the urban environment and nature - the winners and the losers of this quotidian struggle between “development” and nature, “progress” and tradition.”
 
Benson has a laborious appliqué technique that is more akin to the construction of the buildings on his canvases than to traditional methods of painting. First, he pours acrylic paint on large panes of glass and lets them dry into extremely thin sheets. Once they have dried, he uses an X-Acto knife to cut shapes from the sheet and then layers them atop each other, like a collage or the memorable children’s toy Colorforms. Appropriately, Benson’s meticulous method of constructing his paintings literally brick by brick has also been likened to modular and pre-fabrication designs in architecture.
 
During the reform era of the early 20th century the New York City Parks Department was a pioneer in recreational space, and in 1903 opened the country’s first municipal playground at Seward Park on Manhattan’s the Lower East Side. Under Commissioner Robert Moses, who served from 1934 to 1960, the Parks Department increased the number of playgrounds in the city from 119 to 777, most were based on a standard model that was quick and cheap to build and easy to maintain. In the 1960s and 70s Parks experimented with adventure playgrounds, which used natural materials to integrate the play area into the land itself. The playgrounds were muted in tone and blended structural building materials such as cast concrete with natural materials such as ropes and large–size timbers. By the 1980s, with increasing safety standards many playgrounds were retrofitted to eliminate hazardous conditions. Critics also found the aesthetic to be brutal, harsh, and un–park–like. Newer playgrounds relied on more colorful catalog of model equipment, similar to those in Benson’s paintings. Ushering in a new era of playground design recent models, such as Imagination Playground in Lower Manhattan rely on children having the ability to manipulate their environment. Today the Parks Department maintains nearly 1,000 playgrounds throughout the city.
 
Born in Detroit, MI, Benson currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Benson is represented by Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art and his most recent exhibition in 2010 Detouring, opened to critical acclaim after popular showings of his work at the Armory show and Art Basel Miami Beach. Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art also organized the popular pop-up gallery show, Erik Benson: All City in Madrid, Spain February 2- March 1, 2012. He has had solo exhibitions at the former Roebling Hall, Brooklyn and included in group exhibitions at Mason Gross Galleries, Rutgers University; Salon 94, New York; Flag Art Foundation, New York; and the Newberger Museum, Purchase, NY. Benson was part of the Bronx Museum of Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace, and in 2008 he awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship. He recently completed a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. In addition to the exhibition at the Arsenal Gallery, Erik Benson will be featured in an exhibition at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art September 26 – October 25, 2013.
 
The Arsenal Gallery is dedicated to examining themes of nature, urban space, wildlife, New York City parks, and park history. It is located on the third floor of the NYC Parks & Recreation headquarters, in Central Park, on Fifth Avenue at 64th Street. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except for holidays. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.nyc.gov/parks/art or call 212-360-8163.

Featuring a selection of major Seymour Lipton sculptures in context with
Charles Alston • Norman Bluhm • Beauford Delaney • Willem de Kooning
Jay DeFeo • Michael Goldberg • Adolph Gottlieb • Hans Hofmann
Lee Krasner • Norman Lewis • Conrad Marca-Relli • Boris Margo
Alfonso Ossorio • Richard Pousette-Dart • Milton Resnick • Charles Seliger
Alma Thomas • Mark Tobey • Jack Tworkov and Hale Woodruff

JOHN ZURIER
 
A spring a thousand years ago
 
April 25 – June 22, 2013
 
Peter Blum is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by John Zurier entitled A spring a thousand years ago at 20 West 57th Street. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, April 25th from 6-8 pm. The exhibition continues through June 22nd.
 
On view are new monochromatic paintings created in 2012 and 2013, influenced in part by Zurier’s travels in Iceland. The title of the exhibition comes from a poem by the Icelandic poet Stefán Hörður Grímsson.
 
John Zurier explores colors and hues, nuances of light and shadow, and various atmospheres; by doing so he creates a material response to the phenomena of the natural world. His paintings are pared-down, lyrical and yet stark, highly poetic in their condensed expression of emotion and feeling.
 
His choices regarding the physical materials of the paintings — canvas or linen for the support, oil or distemper (dry pigments mixed with rabbit skin glue and water) — are influenced by traditional Japanese aesthetics, particularly mono no aware; late-medieval wall paintings in Swedish churches, as well as modern painters such as Cézanne, Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Franz Kline.
 
Above all, he is questioning the quality and meaning of painting. He aims to find the right balance between the raw materials (which he calls “the given”) and the transformation of these materials into the finished paintings. In doing so, he keeps the inherent quality of the materials present and visible.
 
John Zurier was born in Santa Monica, CA, in 1956 and lives in Berkeley, CA. He received his MFA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012 Zurier participated in the Sao Paulo Biennial. He has exhibited at the California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art (2010), Berkeley Art Museum, CA (2009, 2004, 2002, 2001), Gwangju Biennale (2008), New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA (2006), the de Young Museum, CA (2005), and the Whitney Biennial, NY (2002). In 2010 he was awarded the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
 
For additional information and photographic material please contact Renée Albada Jelgersma or David Blum at art@peterblumgallery.com (Tel: 212 244 6055). Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10am-6pm; Saturday, 11am-6pm.

Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967 honors the legacy and the work of late iconic artist and photojournalist Gordon Parks, who would have turned 100 on November 30, 2012. The exhibition, organized by Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden and Assistant Curator Lauren Haynes, will feature approximately thirty black and white photographs of the Fontenelle family, whose lives Parks documented as part of a 1968 Life magazine photo essay. A searing portrait of poverty in the United States, the Fontenelle photographs provide a view of Harlem through the narrative of a specific family at a particular moment in time. This intimate exhibition will include all images from the original essay as well as several unpublished images—some which have never been displayed publicly.
 
The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Gordon Parks Foundation, a division of the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation are together creating an exhibition catalogue for Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967, complementing the five-volume set German publisher Steidl is planning to publish in honor of Parks’s centenary.
 
Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967 is supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Support for the exhibition catalogue provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
 
Special thanks go to the Gordon Parks Foundation, who provided essential support and assistance in organizing Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967.