Callicoon Fine Arts is please to present an exhibition of recent works on paper by Benjamin Berlow. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 5th, from 5 to 7pm. The exhibition will run until July 11th. The gallery is located at 27 Lower Main Street, Upstairs, in Callicoon, NY.
Benjamin Berlow paints on book pages, paper bags, envelops and other kinds of found paper. He deploys a range of painterly styles to create exquisite, concentrated works. A student of art history and philosophy, Berlow's diverse pieces evince the intellectual vigor inherent in the best of abstract art. At the same time, the scope of his work is a practice more akin to play. As such, the works produce a multi-form visual frame of reference encompassng the languages of modernism. Berlow's work began only recently, in 2004, when he started painting on flattened brown paper bags, to be exhibited here for the first time. He simply painted black forms determined by the pre-existing folds and creases of the paper. As his practice developed, Berlow moved on to other kinds of found paper, including gallery exhibition announcements, to create a seemingly infinite aesthetic in which different kinds of experiments involving painting, burning, collaging and blotting go hand in hand with the process of disassembling a book to mine it for its old, worn pages--a process that paradoxically stresses the object-like quality of the paper even as it obfuscates it.
Benjamin Berlow, born in 1980 in Los Angeles, attending Vassar College and has exhibitioned at Parade / Wharf Road Project in London, 2008, and at Martos Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, and James Fuentes Gallery in New York in 2009/2010. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Callicoon Fine Arts, founded in May 2009 by Photios Giovanis, is a gallery bringing an idiosyncratic mix of regional and international contemporary art to the Upper Delaware River Valley. The gallery was awarded the prize for Best Booth by a jury of three museum curators at the NADA Art Fair, Miami, December 2009. Callicoon Fine Arts acts in partnership with Nightboat Books, www.nightboat.org. For further information and for images please email info@callicoonfinearts.com or call 845-887-4202.
