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"First Generation Abstract Expressionist Offers Limited Editions through absolutearts.com"
2006-02-15 until 2006-12-31
Vincent Pepi
Port Jefferson, NY, USA United States of America

Amid the number of participants of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940's and 1950's, Vincent Pepi produced a significant body of serious, distinctive and visionary work. Be one of the few to own a piece by a First Generation Abstract Expressionist. This watercolor painting, Rome 507M is a typical example of Pepi's Abstract Expressionist style of the early 1950's. A limited edition of (20) archival fine art prints, measuring 10" x 13" and signed by the artist, is NOW AVAILABLE for $650 without shipping.

View and order Rome 507M at: 507M.

"As ongoing research enriches the already remarkable story of mid-20th-century painterly abstraction in America, Vincent Pepi's vital, vibrant oeuvre of small-scale gestures and spatial inventiveness offers a timely reminder that much remains in this field to be appreciated anew !"

"It is Pepi's exploration of such semi-illusionistic abstract phenomena, at times evoking a nearly palpable though fluctuant sense of space, that comprises an intriguing personal deviation from the American Abstract Expressionist norm, so often given to the pursuit of the flatness of form and color. Pepi understood that the shifting levels of cubist space, no matter how slight, held formal potential for extension into more emphatically abstract imagery of gestural abstraction."

Excerpts from 1992 exhibit catalogue essay; "Space and Gesture: The paintings of Vincent Pepi" by Jeffrey Wechsler, Assistant Director, Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ.

Harry Rand comments in "Vincent Pepi"

"Currently, it is impossible to discuss Vincent Pepi in the present tense. His art, Janus-like, looks to a past moment of elective seclusion and a future moment of restitution to his history. That makes him an "interesting" painter for the New York School and something of a test case for historians. As his contemporaries' prestige ascended, their pictures were sought, and now, with a dwindling supply, all sorts of minor or ersatz reputations are being proffered as facile alternatives to the "names"; that is not Pepi's problem. There is nothing counterfeit or inauthentic about his work. The artists who gathered in New York, as those who formerly convened in Paris, came from many points in an aesthetic empire invisible to the map-maker. Guston from Canada, Kline from Pennsylvania, Pollock from California, Still from the Northwest, deKooning from the Netherlands, Rothko from Russia, Gorky from Armenia-only Newman and Gottlieb were locals growing up in the vortex that attracted the others. Few really left: Jacob Kainen for Washington, Harry Jackson for a dream of a western sunset, and Vincent Pepi, who though born in Boston and trained in New York, returned from Europe to an America where he was invisible in plain sight.

"Like 'first generation' Abstract Expressionists, Pepi never lost his grounding in manual virtuosity and drew incessantly from still lives and nudes, and, as in other first generation Abstract Expressioinists, the residue if this surety of line and form elevates his art, as its absence can be felt as a hollowness in subsequent abstract art.

"Pepi is very much an individual,with a consistency that courses through all of his works, right up to Eclipse/Kiss (No.#657 1981), a richly painted oil, redolent of certain lyrical deKoonings of thirty years earlier without in any way emulating him. Upon his return to America, Pepi became an in-house graphic designer for New York University,that was his day job. At the same time, he remained in the center of the art world, with Pepi's painting studio one floor below Franz Kline's and across the hall from Conrad Marcarelli.

"In 1953 he showed at the Stable Gallery, which again situated him at the center of the painter's world. Long over-looked,partly by his own choices, Pepi is returned, a player in history. The past will care for the future."

Condensed from catalogue essay by Harry Rand, 1996

Vincent Pepi's work can be found in collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art in New York City; Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC; The New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, NJ; Jane Voorhis Zimmerli Museum of Art at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ; Montclair Museum of Art in Montclair, NJ; Heckscher Museum of Art Huntington on Long Island, NY; Brown University, David Winton Bell Gallery in Providence, RI; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of Greensboro in North Carolina; Tufts University Art Gallery in Boston, MA; and Wesleyan University in Middletown CT.

Vincent Pepi is one of the original Premiere Portfolio members at absolutearts.com. He has actively promoted his work on the site since 2000. To view his full Portfolio go to: http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/b/bettyboop/


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