In the first New York showing of his work, Don LePan depicts the North American city in watercolor and photomontage. LePan’s watercolor work goes against the tradition of presenting skyscrapers with a hard and precise verticality; the lines of these towers blur and bleed into each other, the sky, and the natural world, and often into the human life of the city. In their sense of movement these watercolor cityscapes (of bridges and baseball stadiums as well as skyscrapers) at times recall the work of John Marin, while in their viewpoint they suggest the bird’s-eye city views of Oskar Kokoschka or John Hartman. Hartman (whose touring exhibition Cities appeared at the Charles Cowes Gallery in Manhattan in December of 2007) has described these watercolor works as “very good, and together they form a coherent and focused body of work.” The exhibition will include images from as far afield as London and Sydney, but the primary focus will be on the American city – and on views of Manhattan and of Brooklyn in particular.

Each painting bears several titles, suggesting sometimes devastatingly different perspectives on complex urban scenes: alternative titles for one 2007 watercolor, for example, include “New Orleans and the Mississippi: Life Carries On in the Crescent City” and “Assault on the Lower Ninth Ward by the Administration of George W. Bush.”

Displayed alongside the watercolors will be several works in photomontage that bring together splintered cityscape perspectives in overlapping wholes; each photomontage displayed relates directly to scenes represented in one or more of the watercolor paintings.