Van Doren Waxter

About the Presentation
Van Doren Waxter’s group presentation will take the year 1950 as its reference point for a focused exploration of American gestural painting, including the artists James Brooks, Richard Diebenkorn, Zoe Longfield, Hedda Sterne, and Jack Tworkov. Both Brooks, an early advocate for abstraction, and Sterne, who worked at the intersection of European Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, posed for Nina Leen’s 1950 photograph of the so-called “Irascibles”, a group of artists who protested the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s hostility to modernism. Tworkov was another key member of the New York School, developing his sweeping AbEx style alongside his friends Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko before teaching artists such as Robert Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. On the West Coast, Diebenkorn made his earliest abstractions while living in Sausalito, California, in the late 1940s. San Francisco-based Longfield often borrowed from watercolor traditions to establish her distinct style, in which forms ebbed and flowed between the organic and the architectural.

About the Gallery
Van Doren Waxter presents a cross generational program reflecting the shared vision of John Van Doren, Dorsey Waxter, and Elizabeth Sadeghi. It brings together foundations and estates with a roster of emerging and international artists specializing in artists working from the post WW II era to the present with an emphasis on American Abstraction.  The gallery represents the James Brooks Foundation, the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, the Tom Fairs Estate, the Harvey Quaytman Trust, and the Hedda Sterne Foundation.  Contemporary artists include Caetano de Almeida, Marsha Cottrell, TM Davy, Jeronimo Elespe, Volker Hüller, Brian Rochefort, Jackie Saccoccio and Daisy Youngblood.  Additionally, the gallery handles secondary market work specializing in John Chamberlain, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Ellsworth Kelly, Lee Krasner, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank Stella, Wayne Thiebaud, and Anne Truitt, among others.  The combined program positions contemporary artists who are actively creating new work within the context of historical artists.