This weekend kicks off the new Peyton Wright Gallery exhibition, ”Selected Works From the Estates. ” The gallery is re- hung  throughout for this exhibition of works by artists whose estates are represented by the gallery. Artists included in the exhibition are Paul Burlin, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Art Brenner, John Grillo, Margo Hoff, and Herbert Bayer. 

 The exhibition  opens Friday, October 4, 2024 and continues through 22 November.
Here are works from two artists in the exhibition:

John Grillo’s explosive drip paintings—projectile splatterings on cast-off objects as well as other more conventional supports—chronologically parallel those of Jackson Pollock, though he reserved his most radical experimentation for the media of gouache and watercolor, creating work that exudes a sensuous delight in the manipulation of paint in radiant, almost phosphorescent color.

After serving in the Navy during World War II, Grillo disembarked in San Francisco and enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, studying with Rothko and creating a sizable amount of work by 1947.  Grillo returned to Massachusetts and studied under Hans Hofmann, creating work that welcomed him into New York’s avant-garde.

Grillo’s body of work remained consistent in reveling in high-keyed color and lush surfaces. Critic April Kingsley remembered of his “Yellow Abstractions” exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1961 that they “indulged his love of pigment for its own sake to the fullest. The canvases and huge collages . . . seem hedonistic and full of joy as the best of Hofmann’s and are even more sensuous.” 

In 1967, Grillo was appointed Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he taught for 25 years.  In 1991, he moved to Wellfleet in Cape Cod, joining the close-knit art colony of the Provincetown area. He maintained a studio and continued to paint on a daily basis, reinventing and evolving his artwork

Over the length of his career, he had over 85 one-man and 100 group shows. His paintings and sculptures are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the British Museum in London, among others.

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Art Brenner, a prolific painter, sculptor, and scholarly writer, was born in New York City in 1924. He lived and worked in Paris for several decades until his death in Australia in 2013.

Brenner exhibited in solo and group exhibition in numerous countries for over 36 years, and participated in more than 60 exhibitions throughout his career thus far. He also received the highest honor as a “Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres”(“Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters”) in France bestowed upon individuals who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the world of art, culture and literature and their contribution to the influence of arts in France and the throughout the world. 

Though best known for his sculptural work, and written essays and articles on the changing nature of sculpture in society, Brenner was also an astonishingly capable painter. His works created in the 1950s reflect the Abstract Expressionist movement of the time. Although part of that oeuvre, his style is hard to pigeonhole. He clearly has a spatial sensibility to his canvases, but his color is careful, and unflinchingly unique. His works from that time are gestural, with controlled but choppy swaths of color  whispering and interrupting each other,  creating a vibrant plane of conversation on the canvas. Though they are reminiscent of many other painters of the time, such as Joan Mitchell, Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, Edward Dugmore, John Grillo and even Alma Thomas among others, Brenner brought a spatial awareness that was a departure point for his future years and his life’s devotion to sculpture.

Brenner’s work is present in various public collections and public spaces in Europe and the United States, particularly in France: Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris and Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Meudon. His work is also present in numerous private collections in Europe, Australia and the United States.