In the fall of 2013 Morrison Gallery featured an exhibition of oils from late in the career of famous abstract expressionist painter Esteban Vicente. These paintings were largely inspired by the garden of Vicente's Bridgehampton, Long Island home. The exhibit began with an opening reception on September 7th and ran through October 6, 2013.
Born in 1903 in Turégano, Spain, Vicente moved to the United States in 1936, joining the bohemian community of New York School artists. He shared a studio in the East Village with Willem de Kooning and his contemporaries included Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Barnett Newman. Additionally Vicente helped organize and participated in the famous 1951 9th Street Art Exhibition.
Vicente won some of the most prestigious honors given to an artist in the United States and his works can be found in important collections and museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among others. Vicente also taught at Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, NC; the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, New York, New York and the University of California, Berkeley, among others institutions.
Vicente died at the age of 97 on Long Island. Near the end of his life a museum in his honor, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, was created in Segovia by the Spanish government. Vicente attended the museum's opening in 1998.
In a 2013 catalog of Vicente's work, New York art gallery owner Barbara Toll wrote, "Esteban Vicente created a garden with the colors he wanted to paint. And with the garden as inspiration, he used those colors to paint ethereal canvases."
