Harvey Gordon: Seeing The Small Picture

EXHIBITION DATE: OCTOBER 3, 2017 - OCTOBER 28, 2017

Reception: Thursday, OCTOBER 5, 6 - 8 pm

The Painting Center presents Seeing the Small Picture an exhibition of acrylic paintings by Harvey Gordon. For more than fifty years, Harvey Gordon’s art has reflected his life by depicting resonant aspects of his visual experience. He seeks to integrate convincing representation with a surface comprised of distinct, graceful, rhythmic brush marks. All the colors in his paintings are mixed, in transparent layers, from a palette limited to black, white and the three primaries.

After succumbing periodically to the pressures of both commerce and ego to produce larger paintings, Gordon determined that his aesthetic goals were best achieved, and his long standing natural inclination was best satisfied, by working on a smaller, more modest and intimate scale. This exhibition is Gordon’s tenth one-man show in New York City. Others were held at the Tibor deNagy (1971), Hirschl & Adler (1973, 1978), Fischbach (1983, 1985, 1988), Katharina Rich Perlow (1994), Franklin Riehlman (2003), and George Billis (2014) galleries. Seven art museums in Michigan have hosted one-man shows of his work. His paintings reside in several public and private collections in this country and abroad. 

Gordon taught studio art at the college level for thirty years, and his writing on art and culture have been published in several periodicals, including Arts Magazine, American Artist, and The Artist Magazine. He attended the University of Michigan, the Cranbrook Academy of Art (BFA), and the University of North Carolina (MFA). He was born in Flint, Michigan, and lives and works in Glen Arbor, Michigan.