EXHIBITIONS

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CAPTURING THE ARTIST: CONTEMPORARY AND HISTORICAL PORTRAITS FROM LIFE

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CAPTURING THE ARTIST:
Contemporary and Historical Portraits from Life

November 14 - December 20, 2019

OPENING:
Thursday, November 14th | 6 - 8pm

Hours: Monday - Friday | 10am - 5pm

Select Saturdays: November 16, December 7, December 14 | 11am - 4pm


Robert Simon Fine Art is pleased to announce “Capturing the Artist” an exhibition of contemporary portraiture, together with  historical precedents, at its gallery at 22 East 80th Street, Fourth Floor, New York, NY.

The three-month exhibit will consist of painting and sculpture inspired by portraits from the Renaissance through the twentieth century that capture their subjects through direct observation. While many of today’s portrait artists increasingly use technology and photography to record their subjects, the artwork in this show will be entirely artist generated, created from life, without the use of such modern tools.

“The bond that exists between an artist and his or her subject is a palpable one that is never so powerfully felt as when a portrait is made from life,” said Robert Simon, the gallery’s owner who has assembled a group of historical portraits to show alongside the contemporary ones. “This show celebrates the traditional techniques and modes of portraiture dating back to the Renaissance that are preserved and elaborated by artists working today.” The subjects of all the portraits, both old and new, are artists, broadly defined —creative figures who are often close friends of those who portray them.

“Many artists in the portrait community feel that painting from photos, which obviously didn’t exist in the Renaissance period, require their own category, and vocabulary, and cannot not be viewed with the same understanding as paintings created from life,” said Dale Zinkowski, a co-curator for the exhibit and a showing painter.

He adds, “Painting (or sculpting) a portrait (from life) over the course of several hours, often over several days, is incredibly hard to explain unless one has experienced it. It captures a moment between artist and subject — compressing hours of enjoyment from life, of life, onto the canvas. There is something special that happens when the artist and the sitter are sharing a space together, which cannot be replicated with technology.”

The contemporary artists exhibiting include: Anthony Baus; Brendan Johnston; Charlie Mostow; Dale Zinkowski; Daniel Graves; Diana Buitrago; Greg Mortenson; Jacob Collins; Jessica Artman; Jon Brogie; Jon deMartin; Jordan Sokol; Kate Lehman; Katie Engberg; Kevin Muller Cisneros; Patrick Byrnes; Per Elof Nilsson Ricklund; Rodrigo Mateo; Rubin Gabeau; Savannah Tate Cuff; Ted Minoff; Travis Schlaht; Tsultrim Tenzin and Zoe Dufour.

The historical artists shown include: John Singer Sargent; Simon Vouet; John Opie; Peder Severin Krøyer; Elisabeth Jericho-Baumann; Anton Einsle; Charles Carolus-Duran; George Healy; Fritz Behn; Il Piccio and others.

Artists in Conversation
Robert Simon, Milene Fernandez, and Dale Zinkowski will discuss aspects of contemporary portraiture with comments from artists represented in the exhibition on Monday, December 16, 2019 from 6:00 PM 8:30 PM

RSVP is required and space is limited. Please email Dominic Ferrante at dfj@robertsimon.com to attend.

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OCTOBER ART WEEK | ART WALK

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A young toddler Virgin spinning. It is painted by Juan Simón Gutiérrez

Thursday, October 30, 2019
5 - 9pm

Robert Simon Fine Art
22 East 80th Street, Fourth Floor
New York, NY 10075

We are excited to again participate
in the October Art Week Art Walk!

Please stop by the gallery and enjoy refreshments
while perusing our exhibition.

For more information on the event, please visit: www.octoberartweek.com

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INTRODUCING ANTHONY BAUS : After the Antique

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A sepia toned landscape with ruins, with two figures moving left to right.

INTRODUCING ANTHONY BAUS
After the Antique 

January 26 – February 22, 2019

Preview, as part of MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK
Friday, January 25th, 4-8 pm

 

Drawings and paintings by the American artist Anthony Baus (b. 1981) will be featured in an exhibition opening on January 26th at Robert Simon Fine Art, 22 East 80th Street, in Manhattan.  As the title indicates, the exhibition is intended to introduce the artist’s work to a new audience.  The timing of the exhibition, during New York’s Master Drawings week, will permit collectors of both contemporary art and Old Masters to experience Baus’s unique vision, which mines the world of antiquity as source material for contemporary issues, expressed through an astonishing graphic facility derived from intense study of Italian baroque drawing.

The phrase “After the Antique” has two associations.  The first is conventional cataloguing terminology that describes a work of art derived or copied from an ancient model or source.  The second is purely chronological: “after” in time.  Anthony Baus’s work meets both criteria, but his references from the ancient world are never literal; rather they are romantic, meditative, and original.  His impressive technique does not reflect the mind of a copyist.  The style of Old Master drawings that Baus has embraced is his preferred language of expression, but his content is entirely personal.  Baus has described it as “romantically inspired narratives created on scaffolding of ancient architecture, richly imbued with symbolism and mystery.”

For the artist the present exhibition began as a meditation on time.  Months spent in Rome drew Baus into study of and contemplation on the Mithraic Mysteries, the cult religion practiced there from the 1st to the 4th centuries A.D.  The characters that inform Mithraism provide the starting point for Baus’s rumination on thought and the position of man in the universe, expressed through symbolism both historical and fantastical.

Baus’s works can be savored as intricate compositions of great beauty and finesse. They are also complex and sophisticated allegories on weighty themes.  However appreciated or approached, they provide an introduction to a visionary artist of earnest intent and expansive imagination.

Anthony Baus is an alumnus and faculty member of the Grand Central Atelier in Long Island City, New York.

During the exhibition, a group of selected Old Master drawings will be on view concurrently.

A conversation between Robert Simon and Anthony Baus will take place at the gallery
on Thursday, February 7th at 6pm.  Space is limited and reservations are required.

 

A pack of hyenas roams the ruins of the Mithraic Mysteries.
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The Artist in Conversation - Pamela Talese

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PAINTING THE THIRD ROME

A Conversation with Pamela Talese, Robert Simon, and Luigi Ballerini
December 12, 2019

PAMELA TALESE has been painting the urban landscape in New York since 2000, and in 2012, began making annual visits to Rome. THE THIRD ROME: Allegorical Landscapes of the Modern City is the first exhibition in an ongoing project exploring the rioni of Rome outside the “centro storico” — those areas reflecting the dynamic growth and transformation of the city in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. THE THIRD ROME complements the artist’s work in the outer boroughs of New York City, which treat similar issues, though manifested in disparate visual and cultural environments.

ROBERT SIMON is an art historian, art dealer, and lover of Rome. THE THIRD ROME is the first solo exhibition by a contemporary artist at Robert Simon Fine Art, although one which extends to the present day the tradition born in the Renaissance of using Rome as both subject and inspiration.

LUIGI BALLERINI is Emeritus Professor UCLA, Distinguished poet, translator, food historian, and critic, and author of the essay “The Foro Mussolini and The Marble Boys of Yesteryear” that accompanies the photographs by George Mott's FORO ITALICO (PowerHouse Books 2003).

PAMELA TALESE : The Third Rome

The back of an ancient marble statue in front of a modern landscape with an overpass in the background.

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THE THIRD ROME
Allegorical Landscapes of the Modern City

November 7 - December 15, 2018
Opening Reception, Wednesday, November 7th, 6-9pm

Hours: Monday - Friday, 10am - 5:30pm
Also Open Saturday December 1st, 8th and 15th from 11 - 5pm

*As featured in The New Criterion’s Critic’s Notebook!

Paintings of modern Rome by New York artist Pamela Talese will be featured in an exhibition opening November 7th at Robert Simon Fine Art at 22 East 80th Street. The group of small-scale oils reflects the painter’s multi-year exploration of late nineteenth century and twentieth- century sites and neighborhoods of the city overlooked by tourists but vibrant with the energy of contemporary life and redolent of their fraught twentieth-century past.

THE THIRD ROME takes its title from Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini’s celebrated dictum that “After the Rome of the emperors, after the Rome of the Popes, there will come the Rome of the people.” This became a cultural mantra for Mussolini during his regime (1922-1943) – and one that was manifested by the massive transformation of the architectural and civic landscape of the city. Many of the buildings and monuments of the Fascist era remain, accompanied by the long shadow of pseudo-populism.

This is the first solo exhibition by a contemporary artist at Robert Simon Fine Art, which specializes in Old Master paintings. Robert Simon comments, “This is not the Rome of Panini or Piranesi, but one unvarnished, so to speak, and one which reveals the tragedy as well as the triumph of the city’s history. The contrasts of the brutal elegance of the modern structures, both appealing and unnerving, with the older architecture creates a dialogue that raises issues that resonate today: the transience of political power, the tragedy of demagogic populism, and the vitality of the individual.”

Many of the paintings were completed on site during Talese’s annual visits to Rome, which began in 2012. Nearly half were done around the Foro Italico (formerly Foro Mussolini) in Rome’s northern section. Built between 1928 and 1938, the Foro Italico was a sports complex intended for the Olympic Games --as well as a school where young boys trained in aggressive combat sports which, Mussolini believed, would develop the qualities of good soldiers. Throughout the park, the giant figures of Carrara marble stand naked and posed – each holding the implement of his sport. Talese’s re-imagined interpretation of their classical style portrays both the visible and invisible, past and present, experience and evidence, of these ordinary people, civic leaders, tyrants, and of course, defeated heroes.

“Benito Mussolini was the Robert Moses of Rome, both ‘master builders’ with megalomaniacal views of what their city should look like regardless of the people who lived in it,” notes Pamela Talese. “Mussolini’s Third Rome was one of constant and remorseless demolitions in the city center which outpaced the building of new neighborhoods on the periphery. By the early 1930’s, this propaganda-driven planning left at least 25,000 Romans homeless.”

The themes of Talese’s previous exhibitions “718,” focusing on sites in New York’s outer boroughs, through “Rust Never Sleeps,” an essay on industrial decay, find new life in this ancient city.

For more images from the exhibition, including installation views,
please click through to our contemporary page:

CONTEMPORARY

Image: Marble Athlete With Club from the Province of Lecce. Oil on panel, 9 3/4 x 9 3/4 in

The Unbroken Line: Old and New Masters Exhibition

Four portraits: Top left is young man with mustache, top right is young man with short bread, bottom left is young man looking left, bottom right is young woman looking down.

The exhibition has been extended until June 8th.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE AVAILABLE HERE 

 

The Unbroken Line: Old and New Masters
May 11 – June 8, 2018
Hours: Monday – Friday, 11:00am – 5:00pm


Robert Simon Fine Art and Grand Central Atelier present an exhibition of contemporary paintings and drawings alongside old masters works, revealing the unbroken line of fine art into the 21st Century.

Art historian and art dealer Robert Simon will curate a selection of Old Master paintings and drawings paired with new works by New York-based painters, Jacob Collins, Colleen Barry, Anthony Baus, Will St. John, Edward Minoff and Justin Wood, who are all principle instructors at Grand Central Atelier, one of the world’s premier ateliers training artists in the classical tradition of drawing, painting and sculpture. Included are select works by recent graduates Rachel Li, Savannah Tate Cuff and Dale Zinkowski.

These 21st Century atelier artists are carefully attuned to the idea that in order to evince this language with roots in the ancient world, one must first be a humble observer of nature and bear witness to its nuance and sensitivity. When fully realized through years of serious commitment to study, this language possesses great power to communicate the human condition with limitless beauty and endless variation.

 

(Clockwise from top left)
Simon Vouet (Paris 1590-1649) Portrait of a Young Man, oil on canvas, 16 ¾ x 13 ⅝ inches; 
Anthony Baus, Self-Portrait, 2017, ink and wash on paper, 11 x 15 inches;
Colleen Barry, Black Hat, 2018, oil on wood, 12 x 12 inches;
Donato Creti (Cremona 1671 – Bologna 1749) Study of a Young Man, black chalk with white heightening on paper, 16 ½ x 12 inches.
All images are details.

MFA Boston's "Made in the Americas"

The corner of a room with red walls. A secretary of mother of pearl on the left. In the center the sold item hanging on a wall. the artwork hangs on the wall.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has opened a superb exhibition “Made in the Americas; The New World Discovers Asia.”  It is a brilliant exploration of the international trade and influence of Asian works of art in the Colonial periods in  both North and South America – a story that could only be told through the decorative arts.

We were pleased to see that one of our alumni is included in the exhibition, an eighteenth-century Peruvian painting in an extraordinary shell encrusted frame, acquired from us by the Hispanic Society of America.  It appears in the center of this view of one corner of the exhibition.

The exhibition is on view until February 15, 2016.

“Made in the Americas” will then travel to Winterthur, where it can be seen from March 26, 2016 until January 8,  2017.