Stephen Greene
Biographs and Recollections, 1967-1974
September 7 – October 26, 2024
Reception Saturday, September 7, 3-5 pm,
Gallery Talk with Alison de Lima Greene, 4 pm
Conversation with Alison de Lima Greene and Jock Reynolds
Tuesday, October 15, Reception 5:30-7 pm, Conversation 6 pm
“Beginning in 1966, Greene inaugurated a new drawing style in which color sparely and judiciously applied plays an important role. Combining geometric and organic images, the most recent drawings have a lucid spaciousness, an apparent rationality that contrasts with the mysterious mecano-morphic forms characteristic of Greene’s recent work. A fruition of years of discipline and studies from nature, Greene’s recent drawings are a unique personal statement by a master draftsman who brings to drawing some of the most sophisticated concerns of abstract painting regarding illusionism and its modernist negation. Coupling abstract form with psychological meaning, Greene creates an ambience of existential unrest, peopled by images that are allusive rather than literal.”
Barbara Rose, Stephen Greene: 25 Years of Drawing, 1947- 1972. New York: William Zierler, Inc., 1972.
“The works on paper from Greene’s series, Biographs, made between 1967 and 1969, and from a group made in the early 1970s, confirmed him to be one of the most inventive and expressive draftsmen of the twentieth century: an artist with a ravishing touch and an uncanny ability to orchestrate a wide range of applications, from sharp lines to inchoate smudges, and an equally wide range of forms, from hard-edged to ambiguous, for maximum drama. The relatively precise, crisp Biographs play delicately wrought geometric elements, like diagrams for incomprehensible machines, against more organic forms and less disciplined passages, while the slightly later works depend on soft-edge swipes, bleeds, and fragile configurations that can imply everything from skulls to sinister flowers.”
Karen Wilkin, "At the Galleries", The Hudson Review LXX, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 309 – 310.
Stephen Greene (1917–1999), a native New Yorker, attended the National Academy of Fine Arts and the Arts Students League before receiving his B.F.A. (1942) and M.A. (1945) at the University of Iowa, where Philip Guston became an important mentor. His work entered the public stage in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950 and he had his first solo exhibition at Durlacher Brothers, New York, in 1952. Over the following four decades Greene exhibited widely,and was the focus of special presentations at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1963), The Akron Art Institute (1978), and The Saint Louis Art Museum (1989). Greene’s career was celebrated by a memorial exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 2003.
Stephen Greene | Biographs and Recollections, 1967-1974 can be viewed online at www.moodygallery.com. For more information, please call or email the gallery at 713-526-9911 or info@moodygallery.com. Moody Gallery is open Tuesday - Friday 10:30 am – 5:00 pm and Saturday 11:00 am – 5:00 pm.