NEW YORK, NEW YORK, November 6, 2013 – BERRY CAMPBELL is pleased to announce the November 21st opening of Edward Avedisian: The Soho Years, presenting nineteen vibrantly colored paintings and works on paper.  The Soho Years will feature works that were painted between the early 1960s and 70s when Avedisian was living and working in Soho neighborhood of New York.  These abstractions such as his biomorphic forms, striped orbs, and stripes with splashes were prominently featured in Artforum (including the magazine’s cover in January 1969), Artnews, and Arts magazines.  

Edward Avedisian was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1936 and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  After moving to New York City in the early 1960s, he joined the dynamic art scene in Greenwich Village, frequenting the Cedar Tavern on Tenth Street, associating with the critic Clement Greenberg, and joining a new generation of abstract artists, such as Darby Bannard, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Larry Poons.

Avedisian was among the leading figures to emerge in the New York art world during the 1960s.  An artist who mixed the hot colors of Pop Art with the cool, more analytical qualities of Color Field painting, he was instrumental in the exploration of new abstract methods to examine the primacy of optical experience, breaking from the tactility of Abstract Expressionism.  He was included in the landmark exhibitions, Op Art: The Responsive Eye, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965.  The exhibition’s curator William Seitz stated that the show consisted of works that “exist less as objects to be examined than as generators of perceptual responses in the eye and mind of the viewer.” Avedisian was also represented in the Whitney Museum’s Young America 1965 and the Expo 67, held in Montreal. 

In the late 1960s, Avedisian enlarged the scale of his canvases and began to use a verticalized emphasis in paintings consisting of overlapping, irregular swaths of rich color.  One critic noted of these images in the April 1970 issue of ArtNews that they were “beautifully and lyrically executed paintings that created a busy arena for the eye.” In 1971, Avedisian was included along with Bannard, Dan Christensen, Ron Davis, Poons, and Peter Young in the exhibition Six Painters, organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Milwaukee Art Center.  The show, which traveled to the three museums, was accompanied by catalogue including an essay by Albright-Knox curator James N. Wood, who wrote that the selection for the exhibition consisted of the “highest quality work of younger, abstract painters.”

Avedisian’s work may be found in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; the Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

The opening reception will take place on Thursday, November 21 from 6 to 9 pm. The exhibition will run through Saturday, January 4, 2014.   Berry Campbell is located in the heart of Chelsea at 530 W. 24th Street. 

For more information please contact Christine Berry or Martha Campbell at 212-924-2178, info@berrycampbell.com or www.berrycampbell.com.