Alpha 137 Gallery

Chryssa Chinatown Portfolio II, Plate Three, ca. 1978 Silkscreen on thick wove paper 40 × 30 1/2 inches (Ships rolled in a tube measuring 35 x 5 x 5) Pencil signed and numbered 36/150 on the front; bears printers stamp on the back Unframed from the Chinatown Portfolio Printed by Atelier Arco in Paris (with stamp on the back of the print) from the Chinatown Portfolio Renowned Greek-American artist Chryssa was preoccupied with the concept of Chinese letters as art forms, which she explores in her Chinatown silkscreen series. Her deliberate experimentations yield an elegant and compelling result. Chryssa Biography Chryssa Vardea...

Yayoi Kusama Offset lithograph poster, 2017 Published by David Zwirner Unframed, with original folds as issued (see photo) Gorgeous Yayoi Kusama offset lithograph poster published by David Zwirner Gallery for a 2018 exhibition. It has natural folds as it was folded in a square, but is otherwise in excellent condition and the folds will frame out This print originally accompanied the monograph "Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life," published to accompany an exhibition held at David Zwirner, New York, 2017. It was printed in a limited, but unknown edition and has since sold out Yayoi Kusama Biography Yayoi Kusama's work has transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: Pop art and Minimalism. Her highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures, which allude at once to microscopic and macroscopic universes. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama’s work has been featured widely in both solo and group presentations. She presented her first solo show in her native Japan in 1952. In the mid-1960s, she established herself in New York as an important avant-garde artist by staging groundbreaking and influential happenings, events, and exhibitions. Her work gained renewed widespread recognition in the late 1980s following a number of international solo exhibitions, including shows at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, both of which took place in 1989. She represented Japan in 1993 at the 45th Venice Biennale, to much critical acclaim. In 1998, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, co-organized Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968, which toured to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1998-1999), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1999). More recently, in 2011 to 2012, her work was the subject of a large-scale retrospective that traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. From 2012 through 2015, three major museum solo presentations of the artist’s work simultaneously traveled to major museums throughout Japan, Asia, and Central and South America. In 2015, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, organized a comprehensive overview of Kusama’s practice that traveled to Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Helsinki Art Museum. In 2017-2019, a major survey of the artist’s work, Infinity Mirrors, was presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Seattle Art Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia. Yayoi Kusama: Life Is the Heart of the Rainbow, which marked the first large-scale exhibition of Kusama’s work presented in Southeast Asia, opened at the National Gallery of Singapore in 2017 and traveled to the Queensland Art Gallery Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, Jakarta. In 2019, All About Love Speaks Forever, an exhibition "tailor-made" specifically for the Fosun Foundation, Shanghai included more than 40 works by the artist. A comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work was on view at Gropius Bau, Berlin in 2021, and traveled to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2022. KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature...

Judy Chicago Madame De Stael Dessert Plate, 2020 Silkscreen on fine bone china Signed in plate, Signature fired on bottom 8 33/100 × 8 33/100 x .3 inch...

Robert Indiana 0, from the original Numbers portfolio (Sheehan 46-55), 1968 Color Silkscreen on Wove Paper Limited Edition of 2500 (unsigned) Frame included: Elegantly matted and fra...

3-D sculpted multiple (to be hung on the wall) by British Pop Art pioneer Richard Smith: Richard Smith D from Logo Suite (Magenta), 1971 Silkscreen on 3-D Molded Plastic Over Wood P...

Thelma Appel Meeting Plaza, 2018 25 Color Silkscreen on 320 Gram Coventry paper with full margins and deckled edges. Accompanied by ARTIST SIGNED, gallery issued Certificate of Authenticity (COA) - hand signed by BOTH the artist and gallery director 23.5" (vertical) x 29.25" (horizontal) Hand signed, titled, annotated & dated on the lower right front - a rare Artists Proof, aside from the limited edition of 75 Unframed This magnificent silkscreen, Meeting Plaza is signed, dated and numbered in graphite pencil on the front from the limited edition of 75. Other examples of this work were exhibited in the 2021 show "New York and No Place Else: Art that Celebrates New York" at the Chashama Foundation, New York, and it was also featured in the invitational exhibition "Women on Paper" in April, 2021 at the Sager Reeves Gallery in Columbia, Missouri. "Meeting Plaza" is a place where people from all over the world are always welcome to meet in peace and enjoyment; an exquisite 25-color limited edition silkscreen done in collaboration with master printer Gary Lichtenstein. The work is evocative of New York's Rockefeller Center and the United Nations, but the flags are abstracted, to emphasize international unity, rather than single out any individual country. The artist explained: "I wanted to convey a city that welcomed all nationalities and all people… The flags for me are a counterpoint to the city’s geometric architecture, and their suggested movement and irregular shapes echo the organic morphology of the people below. I painted an evening sky. It is dusk. Nobody is rushing. People are conversing with each other, walking slowly or gathering in small groups enjoying a calm evening in the New York City…I, too, am one of the people converging at the 'Meeting Plaza' ...” Other examples of "Meeting Plaza" were exhibited in the 2021 show "New York and No Place Else: Art that Celebrates New York" at the Chashama Foundation, New York, and the print was featured in the invitational exhibition "Women on Paper" in April, 2021 at the Sager Reeves Gallery in Columbia, Missouri. Thelma Appel biography A co-founder of the Bennington College Summer Painting Workshop, Thelma Appel is a representational and abstract painter who has been working and teaching for more than six decades. Most recently, she was subject of a 50-year career survey (October, 2019 -February 2020) at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont, entitled Thelma Appel: Abstract/Observed curated by Mara Williams, and she exhibited at the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut which acquired one of her fabric collages for their permanent collection. Thelma Appel was raised in Darjeeling, India and educated in London, England, at St. Martin's School of Art (now Central St. Martins) and Hornsey College of Art before emigrating to the United States in the 1960s. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues, including the Bennington Museum, the Berkshire Museum in North Adams, Mass., the Children's Museum of the Arts in New York City, the Mattatuck Museum, the Brattleboro Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont and the University of Pennsylvania Fine Arts Gallery. In 1974 she was awarded a YADDO Fellowship, and in 1975, Thelma Appel, along with the painter Carol Haerer, co-founded the Bennington College Summer Painting Workshop, where many distinguished painters of the day, both abstract and representational, conducted master classes. Among them were Neil Welliver, John Button, Alice Neel, Larry Poons, Friedel Dzubas, Stanley Boxer, Elizabeth Murray and Doug Ohlson – a program that continued until 1980. She has also taught drawing at Parsons School of Design, painting at Southern Vermont College and at the University of Connecticut. Appel’s work has been presented at Art on Paper, Texas Contemporary, Market Art & Design and Art New York art fairs and has been exhibited at Alpha 137...

Sister Mary Corita Kent Sister Corita hand signed poster, 1985 Offset Lithograph Signed in pencil by the artist on the lower right 24 x 18 inches Unframed This offset lithograph post...

Paul Jenkins International Very Special Arts Festival poster, 1994 hand signed and dated by Paul Jenkins Measures: 37 inches (vertical) x 25 inches (horizontal) Ships rolled in a tub...

Lowell Nesbitt Orchid, 1979 Silkscreen on wove paper Pencil signed, dated and numbered 144/175 by Lowell Nesbitt on the front Published by Charles Cardinale Fine Creations, Inc., with blind stamp on the front 25 × 25 inches Unframed This work is pencil signed, dated and numbered 144/175 by Lowell Nesbitt on the front. About Lowell Nesbitt. Lowell Nesbitt, who was born in Baltimore on Oct. 4, 1933, was a graduate of the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and also attended the Royal College of Art in London, where he worked in stained glass & etching. In 1964, the Corcoran Gallery or Art in Washington gave him one of his first museum exhibitions, and by the mid 1970's he had decided to leave the museum a bequest of more than $1 million. But in 1989, he publicly revoked the bequest after the Corcoran canceled a disputed exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, who was an old friend. Mr. Nesbitt named the Phillips Collection as a beneficiary instead. He was frequently grouped with the Photo Realists, but his images were more interpretively distorted, somewhat loosely painted and boldly abbreviated. He had many subjects: studio interiors, articles of clothing, piles of shoes and groupings of fruits and vegetables. He also painted his dog, a Rottweiler named Echo, the Neoclassical facades of SoHo's 19th century cast-iron buildings and several of Manhattan's major bridges. Despite such variety, Lowell Nesbitt was best known for gargantuan images or irises, roses, lilies and other flowers, which he often depicted in close up so that their petals seemed to fill the canvas. Dramatic, implicitly sexual and a little ominous, they earned the artist a popularity with the general public that tended to overshadow his reputation within the art world. In 1980, the United States Postal Service issued four stamps based on Mr. Nesbitt's floral paintings. He also served as the official artist for the space flights of Apollo 9...

Joe Goode Floating Cards, 1969 Lithograph on Arches paper with two deckled edges. Hand Signed. Dated. Annotated Hand signed, dated and annotated Artists Proof on the lower front 22 1/4 × 29 4/5 inches Published by Mourlot, Paris Provenance: Reese-Palley Gallery, Atlantic City, New Jersey Unframed Part of Joe Goode's five part 1960s series "Floating Cards". Rarely to market. The provenance of this print is from the Reese-Palley Gallery. The famous dealer and adventurer Reese Palley of Atlantic City New Jersey - was the second gallerist in the 1960s - after Paula Cooper - to set up shop in SOHO. Hand signed, dated, and annotated Artist's Proof aside from the regular edition. Pop art pioneer Joe Goode (born 1937) was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1937. In 1959 he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute until 1961. First recognized for his Pop Art milk bottle paintings and cloud imagery, Goode's work was included along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the 1962 ground-breaking exhibit New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps...

Ben Schonzeit Yankee Flame, from the portfolio: America: the Third Century, 1975 Collotype on wove paper Pencil signed and numbered 50/200 on the front Publisher: APC Editions, Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, Inc Printer: Triton Press 27 × 19 3/10 inches Unframed Note: this is the original hand signed and numbered collotype; not to be confused with the separate (unsigned) poster edition. This hand-signed, numbered and dated collotype in colors by photorealist pioneer artist Ben Schonzeit was created in 1975 for the portfolio America: the Third Century, commissioned by Mobil Oil Corporation in which 13 American artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and others created works celebrating America's bicentennial. Yankee Flame combines the iconic images of George Washington, Coca-Cola and the Statue of Liberty into a collaged interpretation of contemporary American life and the meaning of freedom. "Yankee Flame" is in excellent condition and never framed. It was acquired as part of the America: The Third Century full portfolio. Ben Schonzeit (b. 1942, Brooklyn, New York) is one of the original Photorealist painters and is considered to have pioneered the airbrush technique. His works often depict still life arrangements that are intentionally out of focus. He received his B.F.A. from The Cooper Union in 1964 and has since had over 50 solo exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. His paintings are held in numerous museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1973 Nancy Hoffman introduced me to Ben Schonzeit in the backroom of her gallery on West Broadway. She had been open less than a year, and Ben was one of the artists in her original stable. His large Crab Blue It had arrived from his studio a few days earlier and was leaning against the wall. I thought at the time it was one of the most impressive, virtuosic Photorealist works I had seen. That first encounter was more than a quarter of a century ago and I have always considered it to be one of the quintessential, tour de force paintings of American Photorealism. In the early seventies one could stand on West Broadway on any pleasant, sunny weekday and see less than a dozen people on the street between the Nancy Hoffman Gallery and OK Harris Works of Art. Almost all of the SoHo galleries, such as Leo Castelli, Paula Cooper, Ward-Nasse, and Ivan Karp’s Hundred Acres, could be visited in an afternoon. At night the streets were almost deserted. With the exception of Andy Warhol, there were no art world superstars. More importantly, none of the artists expected to achieve celebrity status. That was a phenomenon of the eighties and nineties. There were a only a handful of restaurants and watering holes, such Elephant and Castle, Fanelli’s, the Spring Street Bar and Prince Street Bar. Fanelli’s closed on weekends, which was a holdover from their sweatshop clientele during lunch and ragtag group of artists in the evenings. In those early days of SoHo, the drafty, raw sweatshop spaces with their large windows, rough floors, and service elevators provided large, inexpensive living quarters and studios for many artists. Unlike today, there were no boutiques. The area was not chic and with the exception of Lowell Nesbett’s showplace, the lofts were not glamorous. Schonzeit was in the same living and working space the he now occupies when I first visited him, but SoHo was a very different time and place. When the National Endowment of the Arts recommended me to curate America 1976, which turned into one of the major visual arts projects for the Bicentennial, Ben Schonzeit was on the first list of participants I made up for the U.S. Department of the Interior. His large diptych, Continental Divide, was one of the most memorable works produced for the exhibit. I stopped by his studio four or five times while it was in progress and have visited him many times over the years. We have maintained a very cordial working relationship and friendship over the past three decades. I saw The Music Room exhibit in 1978 and realized at the time that the vigorously rendered mural sized canvases and mirror and related works represented a major catharsis in his painting. In many ways, it and the other paintings and drawings based on the same image represented a sharp, decisive break with the tenets of Photorealism, or at least the photo-replicative aspects that had been so widely heralded in America and abroad in the mid-seventies. Over the years we have continued to work together. He has been in almost all of the major exhibitions I have curated here and abroad and in almost all of the books I have written. I am familiar with his studio habits, his quiet, internalized restlessness that manifests itself in the hundreds of small, unknown drawings and watercolors, doodles on napkins during lunch, and imaginary landscapes. I also know that he would rather do a painting than think or talk about it. Over the years I have followed the shifts in his studio procedure from the monumental airbrushed fruit and vegetable paintings to the most recent bouquets of flowers and decorative paintings. Our discussions of these matters tends to lapse into a verbal shorthand at this point. The following essay is based on both my longstanding familiarity and admiration for his work and involvement with contemporary realism and figurative painting. A booklet of color xeroxes with notes made up by Schonzeit was extremely helpful. In addition to several interviews, much of the information unfolded through a lengthy series of Emails. Due to our different working habits these were composed and sent out very late at night and answered by Ben the following morning. They dealt with the specifics of many of the paintings, generalities, his background and childhood in Brooklyn, and occasional bits of art world gossip. And there were odd discoveries. Prior to discussing his witty, tongue in cheek painting of Buffalo Bill, I did not know or had long forgotten that William Cody...

Saint Clair Cemin FLAG, 1978 Lithograph on blind stamped paper 25 × 35 inches Pencil signed and numbered 18/100 Unframed Rare vintage lithograph by this renowned Brazilian-born inter...