FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

GENE DAVIS

A Review: Works from the Estate

May 3 - May 31, 1997

The Charles Cowles Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by GENE DAVIS (1920 - 1985) from May 3 through May 31, 1997. The Gallery is located at 420 West Broadway and the hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10am until 6pm. Concurrently, there will be an exhibition of DAVIS's smaller paintings and drawings at the Marsha Mateyka Gallery in Washington, DC from May 2 through May 31. The Marsha Mateyka Gallery is located at 2012 R Street, NW (tel: 202/328-0088).

A member of the group known as the Washington Color School (which included, among others, Morris Louis), GENE DAVIS is celebrated for his paintings, which utilize a vertical stripe format. This exhibition will feature large paintings from the Estate, the first important show of DAVIS's work in New York since 1991. "GENE DAVIS's most important works are his stripe paintings," wrote Donald Kuspit, as they "integrate the line and the field: the linear field of stripes is an atmospheric reverie of controlled color." "I see the stripe as subject matter," DAVIS said in 1979, "fat stripes, thin stripes, bright, pale, close together, far apart - the endless variations."

It was while he was painting in his Pennsylvania Avenue studio "that GENE DAVIS", as Charles Eldredge put it, "the Washington painter, became GENE DAVIS, the nationally recognized painter from Washington." His work is represented in many major public collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The National Museum of American Art, and the Tate Gallery in London.

For further information or photographs please call the Charles Cowles Gallery at 212/925-3500.