Local artists' work is on exhibit in New York City

Sunday, 07 February 2010 01:00

The work of four Redding artists is now on display at The Lesley Heller Workspace in New York City.

“The Wells Street Gallery Revisited: Then and Now,” an exhibition organized by guest curator Jason Andrew, features the work of artists associated with The Wells Street Gallery, one of Chicago’s vanguard galleries of the late 1950s.

On exhibition will be works from the Wells Street Gallery period (1957-1959) as well as examples of recent work by a majority of the original artists associated with the gallery including Redding artists Richard Bogart, Ernest Dieringer, Judith Dolnick and Robert Natkin, along with Ronald Slowinski, Naomi Tatum, Gerald van de Wiele, Donald Vlack, sculptor John Chamberlain, and photographer Aaron Siskind.

This is the first exhibition of its kind, uniting the tough gang of young Chicago abstract artists who together ran the Wells Street Gallery from 1957 to 1959. They were “a band of young, fire-eating vanguard artists,” wrote the prominent art critic Franz Schultze in Art News, and the gallery was tagged “an avant-garde exhibition place filled with the most advanced abstractions in town,” by the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

The Wells Street Gallery played a major role in granting young artists like sculptor John Chamberlain and painter Robert Natkin their first one-person exhibitions at a time when too few galleries in Chicago, or elsewhere for that matter, were interested in the work of abstract artists. This exhibition pays tribute to this artist-run gallery and the brief yet historic contribution it made in advancing abstract art in Chicago.

The exhibition continues to Feb. 28 at Lesley Heller Workspace, 54 Orchard Street, New York City (www.lesleyheller.com).