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PAUL CHING-BOR: HIGH ANXIETY — NEW YORK CITY w/1 cut hard copy

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NEW YORK CITY — Spanierman Gallery will open on February 3, “Paul Ching-Bor: High Anxiety — New York City,” an exhibition and sale presenting more than 25 works in watercolor and mixed media by Paul Ching-Bor.

Filled with multilayered washes, dense splatters and gestural strokes reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionist art of Franz Kline, Ching-Bor’s dynamic large-scale works are powerful urban vistas reflecting a sense of place and time: New York City in the post 9/11 years. Titled with precise military time, the works combine explicit reportage with an editorial subtext, capturing the emotive force of their locales on the artist.

Born in 1963 in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the capital of the province of Guangdong, Ching-Bor receive a traditional art education in China, before moving to Sydney, Australia, in 1987. In 1996, Ching-Bor settled in New York, where he began to create watercolors of the structures, arches and bridges in which urban architecture became a vehicle for expressing New York’s intensity, loneliness, ambition and drive.

After the September 2001 attack, this subject matter became a natural means for conveying the mood of a changed city, and it is in his atmospheric chiaroscuro that Ching-Bor expresses the haunting anxiety that is at times below the surface and at other times openly resonant, as in his images of the empty expanse of the Winter Garden or in his depictions that feature the solemn and transcendent memorial lights.

Spanierman Gallery is at 45 East 58th Street. For information, 212-832-0208 or www.Spanierman.com.