Spanierman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening on January 19, 2012 of Fifteen Contemporary Artists Represented by Spanierman Gallery, featuring work by  Demetrio Alfonso, Frank Bowling, Jasmina Danowski, Terry DeLapp, Teo González, Elaine Grove, Joyce Ho, Carol Hunt, Lisa Nankivil, Katherine Parker, Clifford Smith, Pamela Sztybel, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, and Frank Wimberley.

 An artist who works with objects found on the streets of New York, Demetrio Alfonso has a veneration for the past, which is expressed throughout his art.  His mixed-media constructions reveal the beauty of his materials, imbuing his resulting works with an ancient and mystical symbolism, while embodying sensual and spiritual forces through direct physicality.

 Recognized internationally for his dedication to the modernist tradition, Frank Bowling has been honored by his election to the Royal Academy, London and by being made an officer in the Order of the British Empire by the Queen of England (O.B.E.). Born in British Guyana, he studied in London, where he was at the forefront of a new generation of British artists. He established residency in New York in 1966 and was the subject of a solo exhibition held at the Whitney Museum in 1971. Using a method that involves dripping and pouring paint as well as often stitching and adhering fragments and strips from earlier paintings onto larger canvases, Bowling creates works in the Color Field idiom that are noted for their optical and surface complexities.

 As in the art of Joan Mitchell, Jasmina Danowski’s paintings carry reminiscences of nature and still life, but their force is associative rather than literal, evoking the feeling of being in, aroused by, or moving through flowers and landscapes or time and space.  Making her own ink and paint and working on the floor, she explores the implications that result during the creative process.  Her jubilant canvases are always resonant with emotional force. 

 From the beginning of his career over fifty years ago, Terry DeLapp he has been committed to expressing his political and philosophical attitudes on the environment. After moving in 1992 to Cambria on California’s Central Coast, he has confirmed this emphasis by painting images that capture the tranquil beauty of one of southern California’s last unharmed places, the farms and ranges of the Salinas and San Joaquin valleys and the green hills of Cambria and San Simeon.  His landscapes and still lifes recall the Tonalist tradition in their elegiac moods, liquid edged forms, and delicate atmospheric qualities.

 Born in Spain, Teo González creates mixed media paintings that belong within the minimalist tradition.  Inspired by the emotional restraint of American Color Field painting, he developed a meticulous method in which he distributes tiny droplets of paint across his surfaces to create a vibratory effect.  In his latest works, the ground has emerged, adding a new sense of space and movement to his art. 

 A sculptor working in welded steel, Elaine Grove carries on the legacy of David Smith and Anthony Caro in witty, suggestively anthropomorphic constructions.  Her forms seem to carry on a conversation with the viewer, while evoking the distinctive terrain of eastern Long Island, where she lives.

 Born in Taiwan, Joyce Ho is a painter of boldly staged, surreal images.  Using dramatic lighting influenced by her involvement in the theater, she paints with strong yellows and warms hues, which she combines with distorted and oddly angled images to create visions of eerie suspense, as in a depiction of a prone figure, whose face is unrevealed.

 A painter who draws from the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, Carol Hunt renders textural images in which flung, dripped, and gestural methods create light, depth, and emotion. Her images are both self-revelatory and speak to the collective unconscious in their evocation of archetypal forms.

 A contemporary abstractionist, Lisa Nankivil creates distinctive and highly sensuous compositions in which she alternates areas of gestural brushwork with linear ribbons of richly variegated hues. Employing devices such as blades, rubber squeegees, T-squares, and pieces of cardboard and wood, she presses and scrapes her surfaces, imbuing the edges of her colored bands with lush textures that act as a counterpoint to the painted ground. With color as a metaphor, her paintings explore a spiritual realm, eliciting feelings, associations, and meanings that allude to a concrete, visible reality.

 Katherine Parker has worked in the tradition of Abstract Expressionism since the 1970s. Creating large-scale oil paintings, she uses an intuitive process that she compares to a “highwire act.” Themes of time and change are present in her works in which she builds thin layers of paint and then scrapes them away, working in oil because of its light and nuances, as she strives toward an intensity of color.

 A realist painter, Clifford Smith is best known for seascapes and landscapes in which he seeks to, “parallel nature rather than imitate it.” Motivated by a desire to “get beyond the physical essence of something,” he encompasses a broader experience of a subject, by expressing its past, present, and future.  Often his spatial compositions appear to extend beyond the perimeters of the picture frame to convey the transient nature of experience.

 Producing her oils through the filter of memory, Pamela Szytbel suffuses detail to shape, tone, and subtly interwoven color.  Evoking the Tonalist tradition, her paintings seem to glow with inner light. In their elusive qualities, they express moods and moments we’ve experienced, but which we can’t readily identify with particular places. 

 Susan Vecsey is an artist working in the tradition of Color Field painting and nineteenth-century American Tonalism.  In her canvases, stained with subtle colors, she captures the feeling of places remembered and deeply felt. 

Carrying on the Abstract Expressionist tradition, James Walsh exploits great variations of paint thickness, creating surfaces that are both rich and subtle.  His work is defined by a literalist sensibility as he handles acrylic with a sculptural plasticity.

Based in New York and Sag Harbor, Frank Wimberley is esteemed for his masterful abstractions, in which he translates his responses to material, texture, light, and color into powerful visual experiences. Using unusual manipulations of his materials, he demonstrates his belief in the unlimited possibilities of abstraction as a driving force.  In his new works, he mixes acrylics with a pumice product, increasing the thickness of his paint and exploring new ways of articulating his surfaces