Alex Katz and Peter Freeman Inc. are pleased to announce Downtown Painting, a collaborative summer group exhibition echoing the spirit of the downtown art scene in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. We will show works by over 70 artists, each exhibiting a painting of their choice. The artists invited, as Katz explains, work in non-conformist ways, started free and have maintained their initial desire to be free, echoing an idea conceived in the 1950s and 1960s about "downtown" and "uptown" art. Uptown art is uncontroversial, so generally commodified. Opposed to uptown art that represents no problems, downtown art is intuitive, self-indulgent, and not made to fit comfortably into a home or institution.
Katz was of course a vital presence in the 1960s downtown scene, exhibiting at Tanager Gallery, a co-op space that began its life in a barber shop in 1952. Like that gallery—and other experimental, artist-run galleries that were moving away from midtown and all it represented—Katz defied categorization then, and still does. Our aim in this exhibition is to celebrate this moment in painting in all its variations, showing work by artists as widely divergent as Silvia Plimack Mangold and Dana Schutz, and even including several historic examples by Marsden Hartley, Al Held, and others

Reception for the artists :
Wednesday 5 June from 6 to 8 pm.

mpefm USA art press release