FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DAVID BATES

New Paintings and Sculptures

October 18 - November 29, 1997

The Charles Cowles Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings and sculptures by DAVID BATES from October 18th through November 29th, 1997. The Gallery is located at 420 West Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets. The Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am - 6pm. There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, October 17th, from 4 to 6pm.

In his newest works, BATES continues to evolve his personal style, informed both by the folk art of his native Texas and his reverence of modernist painters. His seductive use of color and surface are again at the focus of BATES's sophisticated compositions, whether they depict iconographic still lifes or the revered blues musicians of BATES's youth. In the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, Charles Dee Mitchell, in referring to the sculpture Zydeco, states that it "is both a fresh spin on what one would expect to be the moribund tradition of cubist sculpture and a celebration of the poetry latent in a pile of lumber. The music you can imagine rattling out of his accordion, or from the tin and lumber guitar sculptures also in this show, reappears in the jangled rhythms of BATES's portraits." As always, DAVID BATES's works are deceptively complicated; the apparent brevity of a brushstroke or spareness of material in a sculpture owe as much to the work of Marsden Hartley or Pablo Picasso as they do to traditional folk art.

DAVID BATES has works included in many major private and public collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC. He will be the subject of a one-person exhibition, David Bates: The Gulf Coast, which opens on October 4th, 1997, at the Galveston Art Center, and will travel extensively throughout Texas into 1999.

An illustrated catalogue will accompany this exhibition.

For further information or photographs please contact the gallery at 212/925-3500.