Gray at 60

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Jennifer Bartlett, McArthur Binion, Louise Bourgeois, Bethany Collins, Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Torkwase Dyson, Helen Frankenthaler, Theaster Gates, Alberto Giacometti, Ewan Gibbs, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Mary Heilmann, Al Held, Eva Hesse, David Hockney, Rashid Johnson, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, David Klamen, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, Ellen Lanyon, Fernand Léger, Tony Lewis, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Lutes, Henri Matisse, Agnes Martin, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Carrie Moyer, Elizabeth Murray, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Jaume Plensa, Jackson Pollock, Susan Rothenberg, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Leon Polk Smith, Evelyn Statsinger, Saul Steinberg, John Stezaker, John Storrs, Bob Thompson, Cy Twombly, Jina Valentine, Andy Warhol

Gray is pleased to present Gray at 60, an exhibition and accompanying book commemorating six decades since the gallery’s founding in 1963 by Richard Gray (1928-2018). The exhibition features works by sixty historical and living artists whose practices have been integral to the gallery’s vision. Gray at 60 presents the legacy and future of one of the United States’s longest running galleries.

Gray at 60 pursues a single material—paper—across more than one hundred years of art history to survey the myriad ways in which artists use the medium as an index of touch and a surface for immediacy. The exhibition takes root in the gallery’s intertwined histories of presenting canonical artists alongside those reinventing the canon itself. As gallery principal Paul Gray notes, “From the beginning [of the gallery] there was the eclectic mission of acquiring, exhibiting, and dealing in the masters of the century’s first half such as Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Giacometti, and Gorky, combined with representing and exhibiting prominent mid-career artists of the time, Calder, de Kooning, Avery, and Morris Louis, as well as exhibitions for young and emerging artists like 26 year-old Bob Thompson whom the gallery presented in its inaugural show in 1963.”

Reflecting on this history, Gray at 60 makes space for Modernist, Abstract Expressionist, Pop, Contemporary, and other expansive practices to be shown together. These transhistorical readings posit a logic for the works of Agnes Martin and Barnett Newman to hang alongside a tar paper work by Theaster Gates; for the colorful forms of Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler to enter into dialogue with McArthur Binion’s and Carrie Moyer’s; for Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse to converse with Alex Katz and David Hockney; for a balance between the sculptors Alexander Calder, Jaume Plensa, and Torkwase Dyson’s impressions in two dimensions; and for Rashid Johnson’s figures to join those by Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, and Philip Guston. In considering these conversions of art-making across time, Gray at 60 finds the medium of paper a fitting ledger with which to trace the years past and those to come.

Publication | Gray is pleased to announce the forthcoming release of Gray at 60, a book accompanying the exhibition and surveying the gallery’s six decades of giving a platform to artists’ visions. Gray at 60 features an extensive contribution from Elizabeth Broun, PhD, Director Emerita of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and texts from artists Bethany Collins, Torkwase Dyson, Theaster Gates, Ewan Gibbs, David Hockney, Rashid Johnson, Jaume Plensa, and others.