Adrienne French

Cruciform

2012

Coolidge Dam, Arizona Gelatin silver print, (1938), printed later, circa 1980 Unsigned A lifetime printing by Brett Weston, supervised by his father Edward Edition of 5 or 6 examples...

Unsigned Provenance: Estate of the artist Dimensions: Sheet: 17 x 14"; Image: 5 5/8 x 3 3/4" Peter Marks (1935 -2010) Peter Marks was born in New York City on January 18, 1935. A lifetime New Yorker, Marks graduated from the High School of Music and Art in 1952 and Amherst College in 1956. After a brief stint as a graphic designer in publishing, Marks became a private art dealer and opened his gallery Peter Marks Works of Art, Inc. in 1960. During this time he specialized in the sale of Southeast Asian and Islamic antiquities and made many contributions to the field both as a dealer and an advocate of his profession. Above all, Marks was motivated by a strong desire to find great art and make it available to large audiences. After retiring from art dealing in 2002, Marks transformed his Manhattan gallery space into a studio where he drew prolifically and painted large non-objective canvasses. This time in his studio was a happy one for Marks, who viewed this period of his life not as retirement, but rather fulfillment, a fact that is confirmed by passionate artistic output in the years leading up to his passing in 2010. In 2012, Thomas French...

From his show Hashish at Michael Steinberg Gallery (bearing their label verso) Reviewed by Roberta Smith in the New York Times. Abstract Expressionism meets graffiti photography. Cy Twombly in cyberspace. Existential physics. The trajectories of car bombs. These phrases came to mind at the show of Dennis Balk's new work, made during the last three years while he lived in Bahrain and traveled primarily in the Middle East. The show is dominated by black-on-white gestural drawings on canvas from Mr. Balk's Faith Thumbnail series. Full of graphic and even painterly nuance, they turn out to have been made completely on the computer. In a smaller room, the Exhausted and Ideographic series features gaudy, vertiginous digital mixes of colorful photographs. Originally a performance artist, he became known in the art world in the early 1990s for improvisational diagrams that brought different historical narratives into collision. One work in his solo debut at American Fine Arts in SoHo in 1992 charted the lives of Ho Chi Minh and Abraham Lincoln -- both fathers of their countries in different ways -- across white paper napkins. His 2003 exhibition at that gallery was titled ''Particles + Waves With Plausibility,'' as is a recent book of his work. Dennis Balk is an educator, visual artist, writer, media designer and playwright based primarily in New York. Balk has an MFA Degree from California Institute of the Arts. Throughout the 90s and 00s he was an Art Director and media designer for television, outdoor, print and emerging tech and social/ media at; Arnell/ Bickford Associates, Frankfurt Gipps Balkind, Foote Cone & Belding and McCann Erickson, New York. At Amster Yard, the conceptual agency within McCann Worldwide, Balk was involved in concepting high-profile campaigns that ran both domestically and internationally. As an interactive and exhibition designer, Balk has designed significant exhibition work for; Princeton University (The Firestone Library), The National Building Museum (Washington DC), The Jewish Museum (New York) and The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington DC) in conjunction with the offices of James Ingo Freed. Balk has taught and lectured at a variety of Universities, most recently; UCLA in the Department of New Genres, the Università IUAV di Venezia, Yale University, Otis College of Art and Design- Public Practice MFA and as Coordinator of the Department of Fine Arts/ Computer Graphics at the New York Institute of Technology, Bahrain Campus. Since the late 80s his art work has addressed, in multiple formats (including several productions of his plays), the conditions of narrative and the narrative aspects of historicizing the present. His work has been exhibited internationally and reviewed extensively including; Artforum, Filosofia e Questioni Pubbliche, Bookforum, Art in America, Paper Magazine and The New York Times. While in New York, his primary gallery representation was with the seminal gallery, American Fine Arts. In February 2009, INOVA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee presented the early work survey titled, “Dennis Balk - Early Work 1890-2090”. His recent publications include; “Dennis Balk/1890-2090” (2010-channel 171), “Dennis Balk The Arabian Gulf” (2010-channel 171), “ash” (2009-channel 171), “Colin de Land, American Fine Arts” (2008-powerhouse books), and “particles + waves with plausibility” (2006-powerhouse books). SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 2011 Jack Bankowsky, Rosetta Brooks, Ingrid Schaffner, Nicholas Frank, Christina Valentine, Dennis Balk, Jennifer Bolande...

Funk's highly stylized composition exaggerates the one-point perspective of the Manhattan street grid. It pushes the viewer's eye towards the horizon, where one's focus is on the flo...