Norman Carton: Lunar and Organic Abstract Expressionist Series

The Quogue Gallery has the honor of featuring works by Norman Carton, one of the most fascinating figures of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Last year, the gallery focused on works on paper painted in the 1950s and 60s. About the exhibition, Charles Riley, Director of the Nassau County Museum of Art wrote, “Norman Carton, with his academic training, his love of studio process and materials (he ground his own vivid pigments) and his mastery of art history, stuck to art as part of life. As these wonderfully painterly, quite often large and substantive works in gouache triumphantly show, there was plenty of room left to operate in the Abstract Expressionist style, especially when it came to color.”

Building on this important historical association, this year the gallery is pleased to mount an exhibition featuring 15 oil paintings on canvas from Carton’s epochal Lunar and Organic Abstract Expressionist Series of the 1970s. In his comments on the genesis of these paintings, the artist emphasized that they were “inspired by late 1960s and 1970s advances that see our natural world in new ways.” As Riley comments with regard to these works in oil, “What you see in these chromatically rich paintings is an expansion of Carton’s gesture, an opening of space in sweeping curves that certainly conjure the Einsteinian vision of curved space-time, which Carton understood so well.”