The MORRISON GALLERY

Cleve Gray
The Eagle Dying 1978. Acrylic on canvas
70 x 72 inches

UPCOMING 2008
EXHIBIT SCHEDULE

CURRENT EXHIBITION | Cleve Gray

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press release

KENT, CONNECTICUT – About 35 paintings by celebrated American artist, Cleve Gray, many of them never before exhibited, will be displayed at The Morrison Gallery in Kent, Connecticut from August 23rd through September 23rd. The exhibition will open with a Reception on Saturday, August 23rd from 4-7 pm.

The paintings consist of works from three different series painted in the 1960s and 70s, including 'Ceres,' inspired by his travels to Greece in 1964, 1965 and only seen during a solo show at the legendary Saidenberg Gallery in Manhattan; 'Hawaii,' painted during his travels in the Pacific in the early 1970s; and 'Perne,' inspired by William Butler Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium," with the famous opening line, "That is no country for old men."

The exhibition will also include bronze sculpture and papier-mâché sculpture that he created during the same period. About his sculpture, Gray once said; "I make many large drawings a year, usually with egg yolk and Chinese ink and brushes. These drawings are studies for sculpture, sometimes what sculpture is, sometimes what sculpture can never be."

But Gray considered himself first and foremost a painter: "I belong with painters…even if I'm having trouble with a sculpture, I always paint my troubles out."

In the 60s, inspired by artists like Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, Gray began to produce large paintings using a variety of application methods - pouring, staining, sponging and other nontraditional techniques - to create compositions combining expanses of pure color and spontaneous calligraphic gestures. American artist Betty Parsons described him as; "A painter who jumped the romantic fence into an ancient field of signs and symbols."

Cleve Gray was born in New York on Sept. 22, 1918 and graduated summa cum laude from Princeton with a degree in art and archaeology. While at Princeton, he studied Chinese art with the noted scholar George Rowley. Following Army service in World War II, where he sketched wartime destruction in Europe, he began informal studies with the French artists André Lhote and Jacques Villon. He had his first solo exhibition at the Jacques Seligmann Gallery in New York in 1947, and his work is now included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and many other museums. In 2004, after a brilliant career, Cleve Gray, "the painter who jumped the romantic fence" died at the age of 86.

For more information call the gallery at: 860.927.4501

VIEW CLEVE GRAY'S WORK

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The MORRISONGALLERY
8 Old Barn Road
Kent, Connecticut 06757
860.927.4501

Hours
weds-sat 10.30 - 5.30
sunday 1-4