Newtown resident and celebrated painter Robert Cottingham is being celebrated this season with a pair of exhibitions in New York City.

Beginning March 24, Forum Gallery will begin exhibiting “Robert Cottingham: New Still Lifes,” images of typewriters comprising a rich visual journey into the common object. The exhibition will include paintings, gouaches, and pencil drawings.

Internationally renowned as one of America’s most important realist painters, Mr Cottingham is also an abstractionist in the way he selects and separates forms in different contexts. Abstraction and realism are wedded to produce paintings of depth and symbolism. The vanishing objects of American culture are enshrined in a concise and eloquent homage to their elegant design and democratic utility. Mr Cottingham says they are “machines of witness, not relics of our times.”  

As is true for many 20th Century artists, Mr Cottingham uses photography as a starting point for pictures. He also draws inspiration from the paintings of Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth, and Stuart Davis. He explores the machine from different positions and angles.

The compositions are carefully balanced from the rollers of the carriage to the horizontal slash of the space bar. Through contrasting tones and shadows, he emphasizes shape and movement. Light shimmers over the surfaces and highlights the details in depth.

Even the name of the typewriter takes on an iconic status that gains meaning, in that the typewriter is a vanishing symbol of American business and industry that was. When Mr Cottingham crops a typewriter image and blows it up full frame, realism and abstraction join to produce a singular composition. His art has made this machine, palpable to viewers: they smell, taste, touch and feel its grace, grit and power.

Born in 1935, Mr Cottingham grew up in Brooklyn. He studied art at the Pratt Institute in New York, and from 1959 to 1968 he worked, first in New York and then in Los Angeles, as an art director. His paintings were first exhibited in 1968 and since have been recognized in many gallery and museum exhibitions across America and throughout the world.

Mr Cottingham and his wife Jane live in Newtown on the historic Blackman Farm property.

Mr Cottingham’s works are in major public collections including The Art Council of Great Britain, England; The Art Institute of Chicago, Ill.; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; The Carnegie Institute, Pennsylvania; Cleveland Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; The High Museum of Art, Georgia; The Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The Tate Gallery, England.

Mr Cottingham will be present for the gallery’s opening reception on Wednesday, March 24. The public is welcome to the reception, which will run from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.

“Robert Cottingham: New Still Lifes” will remain on view until April 24. A full color catalog will accompany the exhibition.

The gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, can be contacted at 212-355-4545 or www.ForumGallery.com.

 

Cottingham’s “Components”

Meanwhile, ten works from Mr Cottingham’s “Components” series are already on view in Manhattan. For this show Mr Cottingham created one-of-a-kind paper-pulp paintings of machine components on-site at the paper mill, integrating the creative processes of painting and papermaking.

Dieu Donné Papermill, Inc, 433 Broome Street, is presenting its exhibition through April 24. Dieu Donné is an artist workspace “dedicated to the creation, promotion and preservation of contemporary art utilizing the hand papermaking process.”

For more than 25 years Dieu Donné has directly assisted over 500 artists in one-on-one collaborations, taught papermaking to hundreds of professional artists and students through classes, demonstrations, lectures, workshops and internships and trained hundreds of teachers how to integrate papermaking into classroom curricula.

Dieu Donné is housed in a 5,000 square foot ground-floor facility at 433 Broome Street, where it maintains an exhibition space, a showroom, a fully-equipped papermaking studio, and an archive of paper art and historical paper samples. For additional information call 212-226-0573 or visit www.DieuDonne.org.