_VIRIDIAN____ARTISTS__A __CONTEMPORARY____ART____GALLERY___

530 WEST 25^TH STREETbetween 10th & 11th Avenues in ChelseaNEW YORK, NY, 
10001TEL 212-414-4040email:info@viridianartists.comwww.viridianartists .com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEPlease List

*Dorothy Dierks Hourihan*

*"The Flower Show"*

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

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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*

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