Local Culture

X-Rated!

Paul Kasmin Gallery presents William N. Copley X-RATED

Nov 10, 2010

X-Rated!

William N. Copley, 1974

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William N. Copley was born in 1919 and passed away in 1996. As a painter, writer, gallerist and publisher, the artist blazed a singular path through numerous territories of post-war art, along the way charting a vital link between the European Surrealist and the American Pop Art movements.

Paul Kasmin Gallery presents William N. Copley X-RATED, a large-scale recreation of the artist’s 1974 exhibition in the former Huntington Hartford Museum on Columbus Circle. Highly original, libidinous, and unapologeticly joyful, the paintings were unlike anything being made at that time. This body of work, painted between 1972 and 1974, represents a pivotal leap in the artist’s style and contains generous doses of his off-beat humor.

CPLY (the artist’s self-chosen moniker) here presents single figures, pairs, and the occasional group–their gestures and actions translated from magazines procured in seedy 42nd street emporiums. Throughout, CPLY strives to uncover the joy and poetry in this most unlikely of subjects, with the belief that “humor, after all is the reminder that we are mortal.” It is a body of work that stands alone in Copley’s ouvre.
“Bill Copley’s work is to die for…” – Andy Warhol
” CPLY cmpltly cptvts me.”- Roy Lichtenstein
“I shall never forgive Andy Warhol for painting the Mona Lisa”

See Encore Events for more ticket info: http://tinyurl.com/3xhhdut