Soccer Club Club is proud to present an exhibition of paintings by Gregory Amenoff curated by Paul Heyer and Donald Ryan. Spanning the late 1990s and early 2000s, these works showcase Amenoff’s view of the natural world as infused with magnificent power.

Throughout art history the subject of nature has provided artists with a means to create depictions and descriptions of ways of life that go beyond documentation. It has consistently offered a unique amount of resistance and unity that negotiates both the medium and the expression in a mystical and undefinable manner. The impression created by a painter can somehow be a more authentic representation than what reality provides in the material moment.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: “To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.[…] This is the grammar of animacy.”

Amenoff’s paintings both depict and embody this animism. Every subject and brush mark comprising it are infused with agency and spirit. In this sense Amenoff continues the legacy of transcendental American landscape painting, speaking to artists like Thomas Cole, members of the Hudson River School, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield, American folk quilters, and Native American artists. The paintings’ belies a courageous defiance of doubt, relying instead on faith as a driving force that organizes not only his paintings but also the world around us.

Painting is usually considered an atemporal medium, but Amenoff’s paintings embody the state of constant becoming that defines the natural world. Like each of us, no tree or photon is ever still. In these paintings’ mountains, flowers, and bodies of water jut against each other in negotiated dance.

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Gregory Amenoff (born 1948, Saint Charles, Illinois) is an American painter known for his contributions to organic abstraction, drawing inspiration from early American Modernists like Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, as well as the landscape tradition initiated by Thomas Cole and later developed by the Hudson River School. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from Beloit College in 1970 and began his artistic career in Boston before moving to New York City in 1979. His work has been featured in major exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennials and the Museum of Modern Art. Amenoff’s paintings are part of the permanent collections of over thirty esteemed institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In addition to his artistic achievements, he significantly contributed to arts education, serving as President of the National Academy of Design and held the Eve and Herman Gelman Chair of Visual Arts at Columbia University for over 30 years. Amenoff was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. He currently resides in New York City and Ulster County, New York.

[Cover Image: Autumn’s End #12 by Gregory Amenoff, 2002]

PAINTINGS
Gregory Amenoff

Opening Reception on Friday, February 28th 7-10PM

Musical Performance by Glyders
Refreshments by Kiss Wine / Illuminated Brew Works / Visitor

On view through April 11th, 2025

Official Website

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Tags: Belmont Craigin, Chicago, Gregory Amenoff, paintings, Soccer Club Club