The Painting Center is pleased to host a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Craig Manister. The genesis of Manister’s work is in the tradition of modernist abstraction and still maintains a strong sense of surface and pictorial expansion. Structure within the painting is found during the act of painting and allows the paint its own authority, even as brush strokes describe objects and spaces of the natural world. Recent paintings use landscape to contextualize abstract forms. The forms, based on the keyhole, act as surrogates for the human figure. Fueled by early study at the NY Studio School, private study with Pat Passlof and Milton Resnick, and more recent travel to Europe, Craig Manister is a painter involved with a discourse with the canon of art history. In an essay for the exhibition catalog John Goodrich writes, “Particularly refreshing is his implicit regard for the masters, whose echoes appear here not as social tendencies or stylistic tics, but as personal formal investigations. In this sense his intimate vistas, so unconventionally populated, are indeed peepholes onto traditions of painting.”