SURFACE TO BEGIN WITH—

Silkscreens of the 1960s

Steve Poleskie & the Artists of Chiron Press

GALLERY HOURS: WED, FRI, SAT 1—5 PM

This is a show of silkscreen prints—vivid, daring, imaginative, groundbreaking—created here in New York City at Steve Poleskie’s Chiron Press. And it is a show with comment about what makes these silkscreens unique and thrilling.

In Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?, Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, asks about Depth and Surface: “Is art an interplay of surface and sensation as ‘this’ and depth and thought at ‘all that?’” Yes! And in the 1960s, in silkscreen prints, these opposites came together in a new way—one that affected people mightily.

Steve Poleskie, a painter, had taught himself silkscreen printing, and he opened Chiron Press, the first fine art silkscreen studio in New York—some say, in the country. There, he introduced this exciting medium to many fellow artists.

Screen printing had been seen as essentially a commercial medium. But in 1965 the Terrain Gallery had an entire show of silkscreens, many printed by Steve Poleskie, titled Surface to Begin With.

Silkscreen prints certainly honor surface: with their interplay of flat, richly saturated colors, they have vivid immediacy. Yet the very intensity of color and bold juxtaposition of shapes have an impact that goes deep.

The exhilarating power that can be in silkscreen is explained by this great principle of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

STEVE POLESKIE / RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ / ALLAN D’ARCANGELO

ELAINE DeKOONING / JIM DINE / HELEN FRANKENTHALER / ALEX KATZ

ROBERT INDIANA / ROY LICHTENSTEIN / CONRAD MARCA-RELLI

MALCOLM MORLEY / LOUISE NEVELSON / SAUL STEINBERG