Portico New York, Inc., a fine art firm with offices in Soho and Kent, CT, is presenting an OP Art pop-up exhibit at Gregory James Gallery through Oct. 11.
An opening reception is scheduled for 6 to 9 p.m. July 19, when the public is invited to stop by the gallery to mingle and see works by key figures in the OP Art movement.
Op Art is short for optical art, which favors abstraction and the manipulation of patterns and colors to create effects like a sense of movement, uncertainty about foreground and background, warping, and swelling.
The pop-up exhibit at Gregory James Gallery features the work of five artists.
Michael Peter Cain came to renown in the late 1960s as one of the founders of PULSA, a conceptual art collective, and co-founder of the art department of Maharishi University in Iowa, where he taught for many decades. Cain, who studied and taught transcendental meditation, comes from a family of artists and is best known for his sculpture informed by Indian hammered metalwork.
Ellen Carey, a New York native and associate professor of photography at the University of Hartford, blends photographic technique with fine art abstraction in her experimental work. A Pictures Generation contemporary of Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, Carey emphasizes drawing with light, and her photographs no longer represent object-subject relations but rather the twin interplay of light and shadow, stark in black and white minimalism while freeing color itself into a kaleidoscope of abstraction. She’s known for her experimental Polaroid practice dating from 1983, when the Polaroid Artists Support Program invited her to work at the Polaroid 20X24 Studio.
Tom Reeder was a fixture of the late 70s early 80s Soho art scene and a victim of AIDS. Influenced by Alfred Jensen, an abstract artist considered to be a precursor of Conceptual Art, Reeder created beautifully crafted oil paintings with heavy impasto, reminiscent of confections.
The Hungarian French artist Victor Vasarely is widely credited as being the grandfather of the Op art movement and its central figure. His 1937 work “Zebra” is said to be one of the earliest examples of Op Art.
“He’s kind of the benchmark for all the other work in the pop-up exhibit,” said Steven Lowy, the art advisor and curator who heads Portico, which specializes in 20th Century Modernist paintings, drawings and sculpture with an emphasis on artists from the “Founding Collection” of the Guggenheim Museum.
Lowy has curated and published catalogue essays for numerous museum and gallery exhibitions and consulted for such venerable institutions as the S.R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Villa Stuck in Munich.
“The new gallery has two distinct spaces, one representational and the other offering more contemporary works,” owner Greg Mullen, who moved Gregory James Gallery into a larger location in the summer of 2022. “I have always envisioned the possibility of making one of the spaces available for guest curators and exhibitions. I’m excited to work with Steven of Portico on his new Op Art exhibit.”
The gallery, located at 149 Park Lane Road (Rt. 202), New Milford is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday. The phone number is 860-354-3436, the email is GregoryJamesG@aol.com, and the website is gregoryjamesgallery.com.