New York on My Mind, a solo exhibition of recent works by the American artist, Red Grooms, is on view at Marlborough Gallery. The exhibition will include both works on paper and the artist’s iconic three-dimensional constructions, and a stunning, ten-foot wide image of The Strand Bookstore, acrylic and ink on epoxy, mounted on wood.
Red Grooms is best known for his wonderful pop-art constructions, portraying urban life. In his current solo exhibition, Grooms features ‘Autumn in New York,’ ‘Little Italy meets Nolita,’ a favorite New York pastime, ‘In the Paint,’ ‘New York Harbor,’ Canal Street and many other familiar New York images. As we follow his paintbrush, New York is clearly on his mind in a most creative and clever way.
Grooms was born in Tennessee in 1937, during the Great Depression. In 1956, he moved to New York City, enrolled in the New School for Social Research, and a year later, attended a summer session at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts where he would expand his horizons into experimental animation and short films. It was Judith Stein (1940-2017) who said of Grooms, “At times Groom’s humor has an absurdist streak, full of the impetuous energy and preposterous puns of the Marx Brothers. He shares a comic sense with Bob and Ray, whose straight-man/funny-man teamwork plays off against the mundane conventions of daily life. As an empiricist with a keen political sense and a retentive memory for visual facts, Grooms follows in the tradition of William Hogarth and Honoré, who were canny commentators on the human condition.”
Red Grooms has lived and worked in New York City for the past 60 years, currently in a studio in lower Manhattan at the intersection of Tribeca and Chinatown, where he has lived for nearly 40 years. New York on My Mind by Red Grooms will be on view through December 28, 2017 at Marlborough Gallery, 40 West 57th Street, NYC.
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