George Simmons

Oil on Canvas Painting -- Dunham Reservoir

1992

Budd Hopkins, American (1931-2011) 'City Sun II', 1969 Oil painting on canvas. Hand signed and dated lower left. Verso: Artist, title, and year in pencil on stretcher. Dimensions: 36" H x 52" w. Frame: 37.25" h x 53.25" w. Budd Hopkins was one of the leading proponents of the "hard-edge" abstract minimalist school of painting in the 1950s and 1960s, Budd Hopkins (born 1931) created works that show the strong influence of Jackson Pollock and other leading painters of the Abstract Expressionism movement. Hopkins' paintings are now in numerous major collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Hirshhorn Collection in Washington, DC. Recently, he has also been recognized for his research into the matter of UFOs and one of his books, "The Intruders", printed by Random House, was on the New York Times best-seller list and was the basis for a television show on CBS. Born in 1931, he is a graduate of Linsly Military Institute (now Linsly School) in 1949 and Oberlin College in 1953. He first displayed artistic abilities when, as a child recovering from a long-term illness, he began to create sculptures of ships made out of modeling clay. But it wasn't until he arrive at Oberlin that he made a serious study of art. Later, Hopkins included abstracted figures in his sculptural pieces. While moving away from Abstract Expressionism, Hopkins retained in his work the use of intense colors and hard-edged forms. His works of the 1980s, including Temples and Guardians, featured these "sentinels" who were, according to Hopkins, "participating in a frozen ritual, fixed – absolutely – within a privileged space..." Though Hopkins denied any connection, some critics viewed these ritualistic pieces as an extension of Hopkins' fascination with alien beings. Hopkins viewed his sculpted guardians not as human per se, but as magical, fierce, noble robots of the unconscious. He settled in New York after obtaining his degree and has had a residence there ever since. He and his wife, April Kingsley, and their daughter, Grace, divide their time between their home at Cape Cod, Mass., and that in New York City. In his work, he travels widely. He has exhibited in England, Finland, Italy and Switzerland. In 1963, Hopkins was selected by the Columbia Broadcasting System as one of the 15 painters featured in the network's first television special on American art. In 1958, Art News picked him as one of 12 Americans for exhibition in Spoleto, Italy, in the "Festival of Two Worlds." His brilliance has won him a number of fellowships and awards. In 1972, the West Virginia Arts and Humanities Council awarded him its Commission Prize. In 1976, he received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting and in '79 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. He also won a special project grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1982. He was friends with Robert Ryman and many of the other 10th street avant garde artists. He was an original member of March Gallery which showed Alice Baber, Elaine de Kooning, Mark di Suvero, Lester Johnson, Matsumi Kanemitsu. His work was handled by Poindexter Gallery. (a major gallery founded in 1955 in New York City by Elinor Poindexter. The gallery specialized in sculpture, abstract, and figurative art and featured the works of such artists as Richard Diebenkorn, Jules Olitski, Nell Blaine, Al Held, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Earl Kerkam, Milton Resnick and Robert De Niro, among others. His art has been featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Bronx Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum, Corcoran Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, Queens Museum in New York, and the Public Library of New York. He was included in Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six buy Lloyd Goodrich at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC. Artists included: Sonia Gechtoff, Edward Giobbi, Ron Gorchov, James Harvey, Budd Hopkins, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Robert Natkin, Rudy Pozzatti, Dean Richardson, Frank Roth, William Wiley, and Noriko Yamamoto...

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