I’m so excited to announce my next exhibit opening in New York City: The Modern Environment. Please join me at the George Billis Gallery on Thursday, May 2nd, 6-8pm, as I unveil this brand new body of paintings that focus on design and its response to the surrounding environment. In this series, I stretch my typical New York imagery to include the residential outskirt of The Usonia development, a community created by Frank Lloyd Wright and his associates. I also include Modernist homes found in pockets of Connecticut, whose architects also built for the dense city environment. The goal is to show how middle of the Century homes, buildings, roads, and communities in and around Manhattan where a reaction to the local landscape, often incorporating it, but sometimes imposing on it. Here’s the official exhibit statement:
"Architecture is not only a response to one’s spatial needs, but also a response to the surrounding environment of the time. There is no better example of this than the transformative style of the mid 20th Century known as Modernism. This pervasive design philosophy took root throughout the world, but dramatically altered the region in and around Manhattan. From the bucolic land north of the city to neighboring Connecticut, Modern sensibilities where taking hold in every facet of daily life including architecture, city planning, interior design, and automotive design. While Robert Moses was leveling city blocks to make way for the almighty automobile, Frank Lloyd Wright was experimenting in communal living near Pleasantville. Meanwhile, a progressive group of innovative architects known as the Harvard Five were beginning to alter New Canaan and beyond with glass houses and butterfly roofs. As a painter of midcentury Modernism, my latest exhibit at the George Billis Gallery analyzes how this style took hold in the region and how it was a response to the neighboring environment, be it the big city or the deep forest. I want to capture how Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonia development situated Modern homes within the landscape, incorporating the nature around it. I study how streets in Manhattan were altered by the automobile and how developments like the site of the 1964 World’s Fair changed the marshland known as Flushing Meadows forever. I reveal how the sleek avant guarde Guggenheim Museum was a response to the grand traditional architecture of the moneyed mansions that surround it. Even the Harvard Five reacted to the traditional buildings of the East Coast by streamlining ornamentation and blending interior spaces seamlessly with the lush landscape encircling them. This exhibition of my paintings hopes to showcase the transformative power of Modern architecture and design, but also how it is firmly a reaction to the world around it."
George Billis Gallery
527 West 23rd St. Ground Floor
New York, NY 10011
www.GeorgeBillis.com