Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by William Bailey, including recent still-life and figure paintings as well as a selection of works on paper. This will be the artist’s third exhibition at the gallery.

Bailey is known particularly for his still-life paintings. Although unlike other still-life painters, Bailey composes his paintings on the canvas from his imagination, adjusting the light source and relative scale of each object as he paints.

Also included in this exhibition are six figure paintings (four on canvas, two on paper). Like the objects in the still-lifes, the figures are painted from Bailey’s imagination and have a strange, dreamlike presence. Unlike the major works in this exhibition, Bailey’s drawings of the figure begin from direct observation.

William Bailey’s work can be seen in a host of public and private collections, most notably the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Bailey is the subject of two monographs, one by Mark Strand and the other by John Hollander and Guiliano Briganti.

William Bailey was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa. After serving in the United States Army during the Korean War, he studied under Josef Albers at Yale where he received both his B.F.A. and M.F.A degrees. He has been exhibiting in New York since the late 1960’s. He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut and Umbria, Italy.

An essay by Alexi Worth will accompany the exhibition.