CVC celebrates Darby Bannard’s life and his enduring spirit with an exhibition of the bold, color saturated, abstract paintings made during his last year in the studio. Bannard died after a brief illness in October of 2016 at age 82.  The paintings are at once a reinvention and a synthesis of work and ideas the artist explored through his six decade long career as a prominent painter and thought leader in contemporary art.  Bannard was called one of the six best living artists by Clement Greenberg, the influential New York art critic who ushered in the modern art aesthetic and put Abstract Expressionism on the map.

The exhibition focuses on Bannard’s new series of works which come from his reinvention of the painter’s working methods and innovative use of acrylic mediums. The paintings are exuberant, saturated with color and palpable to the touch with a new found geometry that pushes into the third dimension. This new work challenged Bannard to connect his visceral textures and organic forms with the hard edge and rectangular shapes of one of Bannard’s heros – art world icon Ad Rinehardt.  Known for challenging convention and provoking creative responses from his colleagues and the art world, Bannard continued to explore new directions up until his last days in the studio.

Bannard received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1968 and exhibited widely in museums and galleries for over 50 years.  His articles and art reviews have appeared in over 200 publications and his paintings are in the permanent collections of Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA, Guggenheim Museum, NY, Museum of Modern Art, NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, National Museum of American Art, Washington DC, and Whitney Museum, NY as well as most other major US museums.

See press release here.