Enrico Riley “Surfer’s Delight” Bill Traylor “I Say” with works by Christopher Mir

FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery, 1064 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT 06510

March 21 – April 25, 2015

Opening reception is Saturday, March 21^st, 6 – 8 PM

Fred Giampietro Gallery is pleased to present work by artists Enrico Riley, Bill Traylor, and Christopher Mir.

“Surfers Delight” is a fragmented narrative about the attractive forces of the sea.The new work continues to develop a flexible way of working that allows for many subjects and sources to find their way into my painting language. It has become important for me to take advantage of the ebb and flow of my non-painting life and use that as primary information in my painting practice. Painting for me is formal but the formal decisions have to be deployed through something else: need, desire, or appetite. I find the process of painting challenging and deeply satisfying. -Enrico Riley 2015

Enrico received his Masters of Fine Arts degree from the Yale University School of Art and his Bachelors of Art in visual studies from Dartmouth College. He has been exhibited throughout New England and New York and has been awarded many prestigious awards including the Burke Award and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Enrico’s work can be found in the collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and the Werner Kramarsky Drawing Collection.

Bill Traylor, an African-American, was born in slavery, spending most of his life as a sharecropper in Alabama. Today, Traylor is arguably, the most celebrated self-taught artist, whose expressive drawings were created during his eighties, between 1939 and 1942. Traylor was discovered by artist Charles Shannon in Montgomery, Alabama in 1939, drawing on the street with a pencil stub and straight-edged stick on discarded shirt cardboard. The 1982 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art entitled “Black Folk Art in America” brought Traylor to national attention as a major American artist.

Christopher Mir received his MFA in painting from Boston University and his BA in Painting and Anthropology from Marlboro College. He has had solo exhibitions at RARE Gallery and Benrimon Contemporary in New York City, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, Galeria Senda in Barcelona, Spain, and the Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts. His group exhibitions include the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Decordova Musuem, the Daniel Silverstein Gallery, Bellwether, Space 101, and the Mark Selwin Gallery. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, Flash Art, and CreativeEurope.

Fred Giampietro Gallery is located across the street from the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, less than 1 mile from interstate I-91 and Union Railroad Station at 1064 Chapel St., New Haven, CT 06510. Gallery hours are Monday – Saturday 11am – 6pm or by appointment. For more information please call the Gallery at (203) 777-7760 or visit us on the web at http://www.GiampietroGallery.com