VIRIDIAN ARTISTS                                                                          A CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY

 530 WEST 25^TH STREET between 10th & 11th Avenues in Chelsea                  NEW YORK, NY, 10001                      TEL 212-414-4040                          email:info@viridianartists.com                                                                                                                               www.viridianartists .com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                                                                                             Please List

Dorothy Dierks Hourihan

"The Flower Show"

April 26 - May 14, 2011
Reception: Saturday, April 30, 2011   4-6pm

Chelsea, NYC: Viridian Artists is pleased to present a retrospective exhibit by Dorothy Dierks Hourihan spanning over 40 years. The watercolors & oils in the exhibit focus on flowers not imitated, but interpreted as energies of growing things. The exhibit opens Tuesday, April 26th and extends through Saturday, May 14th with a reception Saturday, April 30th, 4-6 PM.

Dorothy Dierks Hourihan is an artist who uses her art and artmaking to celebrate life. A painter and educator, her passion for painting she says is "like a natural high that comes from interpreting and transforming visual perceptions." Her studio production is determined by her obsession with energy as a symbol of life opposing stagnation and death.  In 2009 she had a 50 year retrospective in New York City at The Pen & Brush Club and continues both through her painting and her writing to pursuit a life lived passionately.  

Over the years she has created images both realistic and abstract covering the wide range of topics of life: Politics, sports, landscapes, living creatures, patterns and just plain energy. Again, in the artist's words, "Energy fields, both terrestrial and celestial, observed and imagined, seem to me expressions of spiraling, meandering, cascading and rippling in life itself, as well as a reminder of the beauty in nature's taking on a similarity of patterns in all flowing forms." Hourihan, like many passionate artists, sees communicating through art as "perhaps as strong a human need as drinking, eating and loving."

Alejandro Anreus, Associate Professor of Art History, first met her in the mid 80's when he was an assistant curator at the Montclair Art Museum. Though art for her is a celebration of life, for her, as for us all, life also has had its darker moments with the loss of her husband Tim and her son. Anreus saw her struggle and survival through those times. He stated in the catalog from her 2009 retrospective, "through it all, her paintings have remained banners against despair constructed through her hard earned vision of survival through transcendence".

The artist has a Doctor of Education degree from Columbia University and is the retired Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor Emeritus at New Jersey City University. Her paintings can be found in numerous public and private collections and she continues to paint and write in her Blairstown NJ home and studio. Though now a septuagenarian, retirement is not on her agenda. She has written a novella, "1919, A Kansas Tale", available on Amazon, but is already working on a full length novel, that she works on while not painting.

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday 12 - 6PM

For further information please contact the gallery at 212 414 4040 or info@viridianartists.com