“The Idea of Nature” a group exhibition curated by Bill Weiss will be on view this summer at 33 Bond Gallery.

The show will feature seven prominent NYC painters including Elisa D’Arrigo, Heather Hutchison, Andrew Masullo, Leslie Wayne, Bill Weiss, Stephen Westfall and one sculptor Michael Pribich, working with eyes and mind attuned to the natural order as idea. Several mid career artists are represented, such as Stephen Westfall and Leslie Wayne. An added treat is a work from the estate of pioneering Minimalist painter Ralph Humphrey.

For the artists in this show, nature figures prominently as both a distilled and refracted presence. They perceive the natural world to be saturated with what the Greeks called “menos” or mind. Nature’s epic order, both visible and hidden, seems mysteriously balanced from within, and is the essence of what we call “beauty”. In the Chinese Tao tradition, the natural world is spoken of as “being of itself, so”.

In attempting to recollect and convey this intrinsic and essential aspect of nature, these artists have chosen abstraction as their means.

The natural world is not literally depicted in the paintings and drawings in this show, but rather evoked. It is the “idea of nature” that infuses each work.