(NEW YORK) – The New York office of Hines, the international real estate firm, announced today an important exhibition of large-scale paintings and sketches by Friedel Dzubas and Dan Christensen in the Lobby Gallery at 499 Park Avenue in Manhattan. The paintings, on loan from the Loretta Howard Gallery and Spanierman Gallery in Manhattan, are on display now through December 30, 2011. This is the third in a series of exhibits focusing on painters of the mid to late 20th century whose work derives all or in part from the Abstract Expressionist movement.
499 Park Avenue is a 28-story, 304,035-square-foot building designed by the architectural firm of I. M. Pei & Partners.
Hines, through its exhibition program, actively contributes to the cultural community as an expression of ongoing commitment to excellence in the visual arts and architecture, and has sponsored art exhibitions at this location for seven years. The Lobby Gallery is open to the public from 10am - 6pm, seven days a week.
The show is jointly curated by Dorothy Solomon of DSA Fine Arts and Elizabeth Sadoff of Elizabeth Sadoff Art Advisory. The exhibition catalogue offers the following observations about the artists and their work:
Dzubas (1915-1994) was born in Berlin, where he studied art before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939. Settling in New York City during the early 1950s, he shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler and produced work related to Abstract Expressionism. It was not until the mid-60s that he began developing his signature style, in which, in a seemingly improvisational manner, he created compositions consisting of block-like color forms scrubbed into the unprimed canvas, accompanied by thicker free-form puddles and spontaneous brush-strokes.
Christensen (1942-2007) was born in the American Midwest (Cozad, Nebraska), and studied at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York City in 1965. In 1967, he began using spray guns to paint colorful stacked loops on canvas, a technique that won him critical acclaim. Initially he started spraying over square pieces of tape, and then removed them, thereby creating a grid. The grids turned into tightly coiled loops, which graduated to looser whirls, and finally broke into strokes and lines of color. By the mid-70s, he began producing work more closely aligned with the color-field style of process painting.
A comparison of the earliest works in this exhibition…appear to have contrasting aesthetic, and formal vocabularies of marks, surfaces, and palette. These vocabularies are not just the result of generational differences but also conceptual ones. In Dzubas’ paintings we are presented with a concern for the relationship between figure and ground, mark and form, rooted in surrealism, while Christensen, with his use of spray paint and all-over-ness, references the non-compositional and process-oriented aspects of AbEX.
The twelve works exhibited here provide a remarkably coherent survey of Christensen’s and Dzubas’ achievements, as well as an indication of their importance in the evolution of abstract painting in the latter part of the 20th century.
Hines has been active in the Tri-State NY, NJ, CT markets since 1981, having developed in excess of 15 million square feet in the area. In addition, Hines is an active asset and property manager of both equity and third-party assets. Hines is a privately owned real estate firm involved in real estate investment, development and property management worldwide. The firm’s historical and current portfolio of projects that are underway, completed, acquired and managed for third parties includes 1,126 properties representing more than 459 million square feet of office, residential, mixed-use, industrial, hotel, medical and sports facilities, as well as large, master-planned communities and land developments. With offices in 106 cities in 17 countries, and controlled assets valued at approximately $23.7 billion, Hines is one of the largest real estate organizations in the world. Hines is also a world leader in sustainable real estate strategies, with extensive experience in LEED®, ENERGY STAR®, BREEAM, Haute Qualité Environnementale and DGNB green building rating systems. Visit www.hines.com for more information.