James Barron Art

"Making Calls refers to how I first started drawing. I used to doodle when I was on the phone with someone, not to distract myself, but to make me focus more on the conversation. After awhile I thought, Well, why don’t I just draw without the phone? I started drawing a little bit more, and it turned into a practice that very much calmed me down. It made feel a certain way—peaceful–and then I couldn’t stop drawing." Jeannette Montgomery Barron

“The artists who many critics cite when writing about Alison Hall’s paintings are Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, and Ad Reinhardt. Hall is one of the few contemporary abstract painters that I know of whose highly formal paintings do not diminish in the company of such rigorous ascetics. This is because her slow, mesmerizing, monochromatic works provoke a state of exalted seeing that is unlike anyone else’s, including the aforementioned artists.” John Yau, Hyperallergic

"It rarely happens that I imagine a theme and then paint it later. I don't like planning too much. Life surprises you every day, and if you want to make it go one way, the opposite occurs." Vera Girivi

“Polenghi makes his marks like breathing. There is no figure, no ground in these paintings—just this incessant bustle of matter set in motion by an invisible breath.” Barry Schwabsky Francesco Polenghi (1936 - 2020) was an Italian painter based in Milan. Polenghi developed his early painting style in the 1960s while working in advertising and studying philosophy, in particular Baruch Spinoza. He then spent much of the 1980s in India, where he lived in an ashram and continued to study philosophy and religion. When he moved back to Italy in 1988, Polenghi focused more intently on painting, creating an extensive body work that synthesized his studies into philosophy and his experiences across Italy, the United States, and India. Working in a type of meditative trance, Polenghi repeatedly traced a network of lines and forms across the canvas while chanting the Gayatri mantra. “Every painting of Polenghi’s in fact obeys the Shakespearean precept ‘to thine own self be true'... Thus Polenghi works in a state of trance, transcribing the uncensored dictation of his unconscious.” Arturo Schwarz

“A day trip to the Talladega National Forest at a hunting cabin provided by the Alabama Game and Fish department really left me thinking. I started these pieces midday in complete silence, with thoughts of the world I’m leading and often hiding from... I took that time embrace my fears of developing a stronger grip on my voice in my art practice, in my family, and in my vices. Thoughts from the Black Belt aren’t as sad as they used to be. Full of progression through education, but always has an array of silence. It often feels like the rest of the world will never hear or see about the slow ways of change.” Roscoe Hall

With the success of our Winfred Rembert presentation at the Independent 20th Century, we would like to share the exhibition with our local audience. “Winfred Rembert’s tooled-leather ‘paintings’ command whatever space they inhabit. Carving art into strips of leather, a skill he learned while incarcerated, he memorialized scenes from his life in Jim Crow America, from surviving a lynching, to picking cotton and breaking rocks in a prison line. The self-taught artist had a remarkable eye for color and pattern, and a lingering sorrow that sustains in the work’s quiet intensity.” Tessa Solomon, ARTnews

“Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.” Sol LeWitt “To be truly objective one cannot rule anything out. All possibilities include all possibilities without pre-judgement or post-judgement.” Sol LeWitt

"The people in my paintings are searching to confirm their own presence." Vera Girivi "Sometimes I don't like what the mirror reflects. It's distressing to look at yourself and not recognize yourself. Luckily it's an irrational sensation that lasts a brief instant." Vera Girivi

"Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life." Stanley Kubrick Mirrors and the Uncanny explores the familiar seen as unfamiliar, as in a mirror, a doppelgänger, or in repetition. The show highlights artists who use mirrors and glass in their work, or who depict mirrors through painting and photography. Works by: Dawn Clements Louise Dahl-Wolfe Sidival Fila Peter Flaccus Vera Girivi Jacob Kassay André Kertész Richard Klein Jeannette Montgomery Barron Beverly Pepper Tristano di Robilant Laura de Santillana Elisabetta Zangrandi

“As we were collecting [the lottery tickets], we started thinking about the people behind the tickets: whose hopes are these, and what do they want when they’re scratching?” Lauren Was, Ghost of a Dream Ghost of a Dream is a collaborative artist duo (Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom) whose work centers on the ephemera of people's hopes and dreams. Our exhibition reconceptualizes collages made from discarded lottery tickets, which they created for the oratorio of Santa Maria Della Vita in Bologna. "Repetitive hope keeps people going... whether your faith is going to church on Sundays in search of an everlasting future, or whether it's going to the bodega and spending five bucks every Friday at 5pm. Whatever your religion is, it’s about the hope that you're going to win in the end." Adam Eckstrom, Ghost of a Dream

“[My work is] built around a pathos and understanding of the downtrodden and discarded; a poetry for the underdog.” Mike Ousley Works by: Sidival Fila Vera Girivi Elisabetta Maestro Mike Ousley Reza Shafahi Ashley Shapiro Janet Sobel Elisabetta Zangrandi

"Part of deciding to draw the flowers every day was that, instead of me moving my point of view, the flowers are going to be constantly moving before my eyes. I said, 'I want to do one every day because I want to see the change, to see how they live and die before my eyes.'" Dawn Clements "Clements reminds us that you don’t need much—sheets of paper, ballpoint pen, and watercolor—to make something great, and that the most abiding pleasures may be found right in front of you. I have come to think of these drawings as love letters to the world." John Yau

"Sewing is the process by which I build the world. It is a way of connecting things... We are connected to nature, to other people, to ourselves, to plants, to animals. The thread becomes a symbol of our holistic universe." Sidival Fila "My use of metafora indicates that I don’t want to describe or represent nature, but I recognize there is something of nature in my work. There is something in the fold that suggests a wave or an erosion, or even a human body. It is a metaphor for the real: something that stands for the real but does not literally describe it." Sidival Fila "Ignorance is the enemy. Ignorance brought us Hitler, Mussolini, Berlusconi, and Trump. I believe you can change the world one child—and one education—at a time." Sidival Fila As a Franciscan monk, Sidival Fila uses his art to generate funds to send children to school in impoverished areas around the world.

"[Dryer’s] painting was a subtle and volatile mix of air and light, experimentation and perfectionism, open-ended casualness and resolution, understatement and high concept." Ross Bleckner "It contains nothing, but it’s still a container, a vessel. It contains color and light." Laura de Santillana We are pleased to present works by Moira Dryer and Laura de Santillana, two artists who have never been exhibited together before. Working in different mediums—Moira Dryer with casein on ordinary plywood, and de Santillana with compressed glass—both defied the nature of their materials: the weight of wood and glass became sheer lightness and effervescence. Both played with transparency and translucency, and both were poetic artists who drew inspiration from Italian art. Born two years apart, Dryer in 1957 in Toronto and de Santillana in 1955 in Venice, both died in the prime of their careers, Dryer at 34 and de Santillana at 64, having achieved so much, but with much more left to be said.

Mosaics highlights works that are in dialogue with the art of mosaics, but aren’t necessarily mosaics themselves; it encompasses painting, sculpture, etching, drawing, photography, textile, and mixed media relief. Works by: Olga de Amaral Jules de Balincourt Chuck Close Ghost of a Dream Jessica Eaton Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian Sidivial Fila Hermine Ford Jeffrey Gibson Vera Girivi Tadaaki Kuwayama Sol LeWitt Beverly Pepper Howardena Pindell Jason Middlebrook Jan Müller Sophy Naess Rakuko Naito Kay Rosen Shahzia Sikander Stephen Shore James Siena Stanley Whitney Jack Whitten Pola Wickham Elisabetta Zangrandi "A mosaic is any picture or pattern — representative or not — that is made up of small, often fragmented pieces arranged together to form a cohesive whole. In a way, one could imagine that our entire world is made of mosaics, from the atoms that constitute our bodies to the skyscrapers which form city skylines to the stars which shape the night sky." Deborah Goodman Davis, curator of Mosaics

"Time, that fourth dimension, has always been an essential element in Pepper’s work — a desire to create something outside history, something bigger and more enduring than herself, than all of us." Megan O’Grady, T Magazine Beverly Pepper’s career as a sculptor began after a 1960 trip to Angkor Wat, where the artist was inspired by the roots of the Banyan trees growing over ancient ruins. Pepper’s earliest sculptures incorporated natural forms of wood and bronze. Our exhibition includes several early works that have not been previously exhibited. While she later explored different materials and methods, all of her works share a timeless quality and a link to nature. Pepper’s hard-edged stainless works from the late 1960s through early 1970s strive to capture the natural world and surrounding environment in their polished planes; Pepper’s soaring iron and Cor-Ten pieces take a material found deep within the Earth and thrust it into the sky. "Pepper is ever mindful of history... Her sculptures may be read as timeless references that nevertheless maintain a vital dialogue between past and present." Douglas G. Schultz, Sculpture in Place "I was a woman, but I never thought of myself as a woman-artist. Or a maverick for that matter." Beverly Pepper

“It also becomes an expression of sexuality and regeneration. To me, the work communicates an essential life lesson: be attentive to the pleasures of the moment, and cherish them in a vault built to last for the benefit of one’s time yet to come.” Charles M. Schultz, Brooklyn Rail Reza Shafahi began creating art at age 72, after a career as a professional wrestler. Shafahi incorporates elements of fantasy, mysticism, and literature and film references from his native country of Iran. Shafahi's unique visual language expresses a singular Iranian experience. In this moment of political dissent — and an uprising for Iranian women's rights — we are proud to once again share Shafahi's unique voice. "[Shafahi] has maintained a practice that is singularly motivated by his own imagination. There is a combination of innocence, sincerity, sexuality, and violence... these pieces have the feel of diary entries." Charlie M. Schultz, The Brooklyn Rail

"I strive to create something I would not be ashamed to show Giotto." Sol LeWitt After moving to Spoleto in the late 1970s, LeWitt embraced gouache as a medium. He found great inspiration in the frescoes of early Florentine painters, especially Giotto, and incorporated their vivid colors into his abstract compositions on paper. Although the gouache works have a looser, less rigid quality than LeWitt’s earlier works, they rely on a strict vocabulary of colors and shapes, which LeWitt explored in various combinations. "In my case, I used the elements of these simple forms – square, cube, line and color – to produce logical systems. Most of these systems were finite; that is, they were complete using all possible variations." Sol LeWitt As a virtual addition to our show, we are excited to share several exceptional R Series works. R30 (1972) is one of the earliest and most important pieces from this body of work. This is the first time it has been assembled and exhibited.

Roscoe Hall’s most recent body of work, Government Promises, addresses the “movement of human interaction, employment, education and waiting to be told how one is supposed to live their life.” Hall examines the Black experience in America and the historical tradition of government intervention, often to the detriment of those it is allegedly helping, while touting the promise of progress. Hall uses mixed media and vibrant color to create textured, layered works that communicate not only his personal history, but the larger legacy of African Americans in this country. Roscoe Hall lives and works in Birmingham, AL, where is also a professional chef. He holds a BFA from University of San Diego and an MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design. His work has been included in numerous museum and gallery shows, and is in the permanent collection of museums including the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, AL. Hall is the recipient of the 2022 Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant for Painting.

“I carried this all my life, all of these things that happened to me... I didn’t realize that by keeping my story inside so long, it would change my life and make me sick.” Winfred Rembert, Chasing Me to My Grave All the works in this exhibition are on loan by private collectors. At age 51, Rembert began carving his memories—including his childhood in the Jim Crow South and his imprisonment following a Civil Rights protest— into both vibrant and painful paintings on leather. Rembert was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for his memoir Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South. Rembert’s work has been subject to a wave of critical interest, and recent museum acquisitions include the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin. We wish to express our gratitude to the anonymous lenders to this exhibition.

"Covid forced us to limit our movements. I remember whole afternoons walking back and forth along the perimeter of the garden and looking up at the terraces where others did the same. My figures have freed themselves." Vera Girivi

Alexis Rockman is known for his paintings and works on paper that explore the collision between the human induced ecological crisis and its effects on ecosystems and civilization. Initially inspired by his early fascination with the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, where his mother, now an urban archeologist, worked in the office of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead, Rockman's work builds on both the history of natural and cultural histories and the history of landscape painting.

We are pleased to exhibit Kikuo Saito: Paint with Drawing, a selection of four superb works from 1980 through 2010. Azalea (1981) and Blue Kettle (1980) exemplify Saito's earlier style, for which he first gained acclaim, combining large expanses of color with fluid, calligraphic flourishes. Later in his career, Saito wove together dense layers of colorful, freewheeling brushstrokes to execute works like Copper Moon (2010).

Jules de Balincourt: Off the Beaten Path highlights two significant early works. Painted at a moment when de Balincourt's visual vocabulary had come to full fruition, and his work had begun to garner worldwide acclaim, these works encapsulate the pervasive sense of paranoia at the time, when now-proven lies (weapons of mass destruction) were debated. Off the Beaten Path and Other Miscommunications and Untitled (Top or Bottom?), painted in 2006 and 2007, demonstrate de Balincourt’s trademark use of flattened color and space to suggest a sense of alienation engendered by modern society.

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.” John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent Works by: Charles Alston Deborah Brown Elinor Carucci Francesco Clemente Richard Diebenkorn Norris Embry Lucian Freud Vera Girivi Merlin James Jeannette Montgomery Barron Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe Sara Sebastianis Reza Shafahi John Sonsini Elisabetta Zangrandi "When you sit for an hour and a half in front of somebody, he or she shows about twenty faces. And so it's this crazy chase of, Which face? Which one is the one?" Francesco Clemente

Works by: Norris Embry Sidival Fila Vera Girivi Winfred Rembert Reza Shafahi Ashley Shapiro Janet Sobel Elisabetta Zangrandi

Our exhibition explores unexpected visual parallels by artists who, though working decades apart and in disparate mediums, share common artistic threads: the use of earthly materials like clay and wood, the forms and flows of nature, and the tactility of the handmade object. The artists in Earthly Dreams are also all women who paid their dues for many years before gaining broader recognition. We are excited to pair together artists like Betty Woodman and Pam Glick, Ruth Duckworth and Beverly Pepper, and Moira Dryer and Ursula von Rydingsvard, who have not been previously exhibited together, but whose works resonate in their shared conceptual, material, and formal qualities.

Our exhibition focuses on works from Sol LeWitt's R Series, which the artist created by tearing, folding, and cutting. Sometimes inscribed "Not to be sold for more than $100," these works were originally a reaction to LeWitt's growing success with his Wall Drawings, and demonstrate the seeming contradiction of LeWitt's conceptual process and his irreverent wit.

We are pleased to exhibit Jan Müller and Bob Thompson: Outside of Time. Although Jan Müller died several months before Bob Thompson arrived in Provincetown in the summer of 1958, his influence on Thompson's work was profound. In Provincetown, Thompson transformed his work, developing what would become his signature figurative style while looking to Müller's work for guidance. Müller's wife, Dody Müller, told him: "Don't ever look for your solutions from contemporaries— look at Old Masters."

"His theater work also taught him to paint while the canvas lay horizontal on the floor—as was necessary with the very large backdrops for set... and his choreographic experience taught him to almost dance across the surface while painting, as well as to convey a dancing quality to the marks themselves.” John Dorfman "[Saito developed] a personal version of Color Field abstraction that depended as much on delicately inflected lines and edges as it did on expanses of seductive, saturated hues. Saito’s mature work is characterized by its inventive, often surprising use of color, ranging from frankly gorgeous, richly varied intensities to subdued near-monochromes–as well as by its eloquent drawing." Karen Wilkin "It’s perhaps not an overstatement to say that when we, as viewers, attempt to come to terms with Saito’s invented calligraphy, now plainly visible, now veiled by layers of paint, we recapitulate the artist’s youthful experience of arriving in New York and being confronted by a new language and a new alphabet. The sensuality of Saito’s color and the physicality of his paint handling could be equivalents for his pleasure in overcoming those challenges." Karen Wilkin

Our exhibition spans Beverly Pepper's entire career, with her earliest sculptures from 1960 through some of her final monumental works. Precarious Balance includes stainless steel sculptures from 1968, which are 9 inches tall and weigh 3 pounds, through Octavia, a late masterpiece, which stands over 11 feet tall and weighs 12 tons. Taking a cue from Pepper’s longstanding interest in science, nature, and outdoor sculpture, we have installed many of the works both in the Upper Gallery and in the surrounding landscape.

"I paint landscapes, but not in a classical way; my vision is inspired by fantasy, wildly full of insects, animals, chimeras, human figures and flowers. Each figure is inserted in a different 'space-time context' – there are multiple horizons, water flows from one environment to another, overwhelming emotions and memories." Elisabetta Zangrandi, interviewed by Departure Magazine We are thrilled to exhibit recent paintings by Elisabetta Zangrandi in the Cabin, including a selection of landscapes, seascapes, and Madonna and Child paintings.

"[Miller's] best work achieves a clattering poetry of infinite discrimination." Kevin Killian With limited verbal capabilities, self-taught artist Dan Miller has used written words and drawing as his main form of communication throughout his life. He became interested in hardware, lightbulbs, and electrical tools at a young age, looking at his father's hardware catalogues. His layered, heavily-worked drawings incorporate elements such as repetitive text and abstracted forms of mechanical items including lightbulbs and electrical sockets. "Miller’s repetitive application of marks creates a rich but ultimately undecipherable field." Museum of Modern Art, New York "Mr. Miller’s abstract doodle-grids combine the historic expressiveness of drawing and modernist abstraction with a covert art world critique." Martha Schwendener, New York Times

We are thrilled to present a selection of Laura de Santillana’s glass works in the Meditation Hut. The unique environment of the Meditation Hut activates these pieces, as striking sunlight and shadows play off the glass, highlighting subtle shifts in its coloration. In an April 2017 interview with James Barron, Laura de Santillana explained the void at the center of these forms: “It starts with the breath. I like working with glass because you put air -- your breath -- inside the material and you close it inside. It’s the moment between inhaling and exhaling. By trapping air inside, some interesting things happen in the process. The accidents are written inside the piece.” In works like Flag XIII (2001), this breath is made visible when illuminated in the Meditation Hut, with pockets of air glowing inside the fields of red, yellow, and green.

James Barron Art is pleased to exhibit Sol LeWitt: Small Gouaches, a selection of LeWitt gouaches from 1985 to 1995, including geometric forms and the artist’s later wavy bands. The works in our exhibition feature LeWitt’s trademark use of red, yellow, blue, and grey/black; each work uses combinations of these fundamental colors to create varying shades and hues within the composition. “LeWitt’s pure reds, yellows, and blues provide once again, in the history of twentieth-century art, the shock of recognizing the unadulterated beauty of these primary hues, a eureka experience we were taught most insistently by Mondrian, but which every generation feels the need to rediscover.” Robert Rosenblum

The color red is associated with power, representing passion, energy, violence, desire, and courage. Due to scarcity of available pigments, the use of red historically denoted artworks of particular importance. The Red Show explores both artist and viewer's visceral reaction to the color red, through works of various media, styles, and techniques.