Hollis Taggart

Alan Wolfson: Brooklyn Elevated and Highlights from our New Acquisitions
March 23 – April 18, 2020

On March 23, Hollis Taggart will launch Alan Wolfson: Brooklyn Elevated and Highlights from our New Acquisitions, an exhibition that will be available on the gallery’s website and onsite at 521 W. 26th Street by appointment only.

The presentation includes a selection of artist Alan Wolfson’s detailed miniature constructions of scenes from the New York City of the 1970s and 1980s, including a new commission completed in 2020 that marks the artist’s most intricate work to-date. Wolfson’s works vividly capture his memories of the city, mixing real-life scenes with his own imaginings of the place where he grew up. The exhibition will also feature works recently added to the gallery’s collection, including paintings by Karen Appel, Norman Bluhm, Gene Davis, Hans Hofmann, Jacob Kainen, Kenzo Okada, and Michael (Corinne) West, among others.

Online Viewing Room
William Scharf: Elemental Color, Works from the 50s and 60s
March 16 – 30, 2020

This exhibition brings together work by New York School painter William Scharf, focusing on a formative period for the artist between 1953 and 1969, during which he developed a friendship with Mark Rothko. Scharf first met Rothko in 1953 and in the 1960s assisted Rothko with his renowned commission for the De Menil Chapel in Houston. They remained close until Rothko’s death in 1970. Both artists shared an interest in the expressive, emotive and symbolic properties of color as well as a fascination with mythology, philosophy, and the concept of the primordial.

Coming of age in the heyday of New York’s Surrealist and Abstract-Expressionist movements, Scharf’s style developed into something immediately recognizable, a unique combination of visual transcendence and quiet moments of beauty. Potent symbols – the egg, the eye, the cross – recur throughout his oeuvre, teaching viewers to see his paintings as part of a larger fabric of universal mythos, even as a conduit to an understanding of those omnipresent ideas.

Along with symbols, color was Scharf’s most powerful tool to convey ideas using the language of abstraction. In Top Sphinx, crimson, fiery orange, black, cobalt blue, and turquoise color fields evoke sentiments of tension and cohesion and appear laden with allusive, enigmatic meanings. In Untitled, 1962, pink, egglike forms at the center of the composition glow against a field of black, earthy brown, and dark blue, evoking notions of fertility, creation, and the eternal lifecycle.

Scharf’s style crystalized during this period, as evidenced in a series of small canvases from the mid-1960s first shown at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Works such as Lid’s Night, 1964 distill free-flowing brushwork into discrete vignettes of glowing form, each emerging from the shadowed plane like a luminescent creature from the quiet depths. These forms coalesce into compositions that function like contained ecosystems, small aquarium glimpses into a larger, grander and more wonderful world.