On August 2nd 2014, the Morrison Gallery opened Three Generations, a new exhibition featuring works by Alexander Liberman, Cleve Gray and Luke Gray. This exhibit featured a grouping of steel sculptures made by Liberman during the early 1970s, a selection of important paintings by Cleve Gray, and new paintings by Luke Gray.
Alexander Liberman, born in 1912, was a pioneer in the creation of colossally scaled abstract sculpture. His compositions are constructed from discarded tank drums, boiler heads, giant pipes, and steel beams that are cut and sliced to evoke baroque sculpture and architectural models, from grain silos to Greek temples and medieval cathedrals. Liberman's sculpture and paintings are included in the collections of some of the world's most prestigious museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In addition, Storm King Art Center, the most important contemporary sculpture park in America, has three monumental Liberman sculptures in its collection.
Cleve Gray was born in New York in 1918. In 1940 he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton with a degree in art and archaeology. He was widely admired for his large-scale, vividly colorful and lyrically gestural abstract compositions and achieved his greatest critical recognition in the late 1960's and 70's after working for many years in a comparatively conservative late-Cubist style. In 1957 Cleve married author Francine du Plessix, whose stepfather was Alexander Liberman. Nicholas Fox Weber observed in his book Cleve Gray, “The marriage had as significant an effect on the direction of Cleve’s work as on Francine’s. Here, too, the personal life and artistic development are inseparable.” The Gray and Liberman families would become neighbors in bucolic Warren, CT where both Cleve and Alexander had their studios. Cleve and Francine had two sons, Thaddeus, born in 1959, and Luke, born in 1961.
Luke Gray attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1982 with a degree in Fine Arts and Literature. He also spent time at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME and at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. Luke has exhibited his work at numerous galleries including the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Feigen Contemporary and Gary Snyder Fine Art Gallery in New York, as well as galleries in Washington DC, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and throughout Germany. Luke lives with his wife Dorke Poelz in Brooklyn, NY.
