Alexander/Heath Contemporary
is pleased to announce…
An Exhibition by
Brooklyn, New York Painters
Petey Brown & Arthur Levine
“New Paintings”
June 2 through June 30, 2023
OPENING RECEPTION:
Art-by-Night Friday, June 2nd, 2023, 5-9 pm
CLOSING RECEPTION:
June 30th, 2023, 6-9 pm
Petey Brown Video
Arthur Levine Video
Opening Reception with Artists on June 2, 2023
PETEY BROWN
Petey Brown was born in West Orange, New Jersey and attended public schools there. She received a BFA in Painting from Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts. Her first exhibitions were in Boston area group shows. She has also had one person shows in Boston, Cambridge, Newton, and Provincetown, Ma.
In 1983 she moved to New York City where she had several one person shows at the Patricia Heesy Gallery. Some of her commissioned works are in Vero Beach and Tampa, Florida, Los Angeles and San Diego, California, Hawaii, and Uruguay.
Her work has been shown in galleries in Palm Beach, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as Museums and Universities throughout the United States. Some of the collections she is included in are: DeCordova Museum, Lincoln Ma, Coca Cola Co, Atlanta, Ga, and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
Brown’s work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, Art New England, and The New York Times.
She lives in Brooklyn and Otsego County, NY with her husband Arthur Levine.
ARTHUR LEVINE
from INTERVIEW BY GRANT DRUMHELLER
Arthur Levine is a painter, former professor of Drawing Painting and Printmaking, and a longtime friend. I have known him since he and Petey Brown got together back in the 1980’s. I have always known him as a dedicated painter, repairing to his studio on the top floor of a brownstone in Park Slope Brooklyn.
Arthur grew up in Chicago and attended the University of Iowa where he studied with Mauricio Lassansky. After receiving his MFA Arthur was awarded a Fulbright Grant to Paris. He stayed for an additional year. From there he taught at the University of Illinois in Champagne Urbana, then at UCLA. He moved to New York from California with his family to assume a teaching position at Richmond College, CUNY on Staten Island. Since early on, when he had recognition for his talent he has largely worked in the “known” obscurity that defines many New York artists. On more than one occasion, I would stop in at Petey and Arthur’s house only to meet the likes of Robert Kulicke or Lennart Anderson or any number of painters both male and female active for long periods in the city. Arthur shows at the Prince Street Gallery and has for many years. Up until the pandemic, the Levine/Browns were dedicated gallery visitors, seeking out old friends and finding them in odd places (I remember one evening with them during an opening Thursday eve in Chelsea, bumping into the painter Ellen Lanyon on the street, and a hearty reunion occurring after many years- old friends and colleagues.
Arthur Levine claims his own ground in painting and drawing. His work might be considered a kind of one-man culture; his own rules, rhymes, subjects, technique are deployed. I love his work, and in my opinion, his most recent work is his best.
His work is characterized by saturated cloudlike patches of fractious and swirling pigment, and often, if not always, a single object occupying a hard-fought location in the space–a biplane suspended in flight, a warship, a galleon in full ghostly sail, or a castle under a tormented sky. Supporting his painted images are volumes of precise and finely wrought line drawings, in an evenly steady and weighted line, again like no one else’s. Firmly drawn, even delicate, their quality lies in the deft use of freshly sharpened HB pencils, utilized one after the other by the fistful, as to ward off any mushiness and blurring in that beautiful line.
Levine is painter of note. He is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago and Walker Art Center.
Prince Street Gallery (Representation)
The exhibition is on display through June 30th.
Access is available during special exhibition hours or by appointment only:
Contact Ed Hettig:
hettig@alexander-heath.com or text 607.226.2473.