Exhibition dates: May 24 – June 18, 2022
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 28, 2022, 3-6pm
Bowery Gallery is pleased to present Temma Bell’s 16th solo show at the gallery, which she joined in 1970. Bell had her first show at the gallery’s original location on the Bowery in 1971 and had her family’s dog Mischka as protection. Since then, Bowery Gallery has relocated four times (its current home is the Landmark Arts building on W. 27th St. in Chelsea) yet retains its original mission as a cooperative independent gallery and is honored to present this exhibition of recent paintings by Temma Bell.
Temma Bell is a native New Yorker, but has lived in Iceland and France and now resides in Delhi, in upstate New York. She continues to find inspiration in the landscape, interiors, her surroundings, her family, and the animals in her life, believing that her eye will hopefully make sense of all the complexities, inside and outside. This show consists of recent landscapes of Delhi, sketches from Reykjavík, family groups and self portraits.
“The wonder of truly good painting is that a human eye can convey so comprehensive a grasp. Viewed together, Bell´s paintings suggest that it’s ultimately her affection for the subject (it can’t be simply calculation or preconception) that coheres the impulses of form-aided , of course, by her considerable abilities and abiding awareness of a formal language of paint.” John Goodrich, Art Critical, April 2003
“Temma Bell is a landscape painter whose high points bear comparison with the best of Dufy and Derain.” Jed Perl, New York Modern Painters, Spring 1998
“Temma Bell presents long views of open country, sometimes returning to a spot in a different season, from a slightly different viewpoint, but always creating tension between the material presence of painting a surface and the suggestion of enterable distance.” Karen Wilkin, Light of Day, The Language of Landscape, 2022
About Bowery Gallery:
Founded in 1969, Bowery Gallery has been showing contemporary art of the highest quality for more than six decades. Bowery Gallery is a cooperative, founded by artists and directed by the collective decision making of its member artists. From its beginnings, Bowery Gallery has been a force for the expansion of art’s traditions in a venue unconstrained by commercial pressures. Named after its original location, Bowery Gallery is now located in the heart of the Chelsea art district.
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