Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to announce a drawing show featuring works by John Lees and Gordon Moore opening on Thursday, May 7 at 541 West 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues.

Included in the exhibit are several drawings by John Lees, most begun years ago and recently completed. He works and then amends his drawings, often over the course of many years, keeping a record of dates on the reverse side or edge of the paper, documenting his journey and the artistic path of the work. His drawings typically appear aged, often torn and usually incorporate more than two or three different media (ink, graphite, gouache, and silverpoint). While working on his drawings, Lees enters his own personal dream world, incorporating people and things that inhabit those dreams: his wife, his backyard stream, his childhood house, his dog and his vast imaginary world, made rich by his love for film, jazz, vaudeville and comedy. When his drawings finally reveal themselves as finished to him, they convey a sense of character, of having lived a life of their own, while just beginning for us.

John Lees was born in Denville, NJ in 1943. He received his BFA (1964) and MFA (1967) from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. He has shown his work in New York since 1977 with the Edward Thorp Gallery, Hirschl & Adler Modern and had his first show at the Betty Cuningham Gallery in the spring of 2008. He lives and works in upstate New York. Since 1989, Lees has been an instructor at the New York Studio School.

Lees has been the recipient of various awards and grants, among them the Francis J. Greenburger Award, 2005; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant, 1993; and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, 1989. His work can be seen in numerous public collections, including the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; The Kemper Collection, Kansas City Art Institute, MO; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA.

The Gordon Moore works featured in the show are watercolor, ink, graphite, and gouache drawings from recent years. The drawings are both restrained and complex. To explore his spatial concerns, Moore uses a network of graphic lines as a boundary, weaving throughout the surface defining a rigid area. The inspiration for his grid came from a New York street: rebar jutting through a section of security netting. His drawings, like his paintings, have continued the evolution of his grid, which has become more irregular and asymmetric but continue to marry the intellectual with the physical.

Gordon Moore

UNTITLED, 2006

Ink and wash on paper

13 7/8×10 3/8 inches

Gordon Moore, born in Cherokee, IA in 1947, graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1970 and subsequently attended Yale, receiving his MFA in 1972. He has been showing in New York since 1976, when he had his first one-person exhibit at Cuningham Ward. Most recently, Moore’s work was selected to be a part of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, which was on exhibit this spring. Being featured in the exhibit earned Moore the Academy Award in Art. Other awards and grants include the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, 2006; the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award in Painting, 2001; and the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship, 1980.

Moore’s work can be found in various museums and institutions, namely the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, KS; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. He is currently an adjunct lecturer of drawing and painting at Rockland Community College in Suffern, NY. Moore lives and has his studio in New York, NY.