Deadeye Dick: Richard Bellamy and His Circle
Milet Andrejevic, Jo Baer, Robert Beauchamp, Jacques Beckwith, James Lee Byars, Dan Christensen, John Cohen, Mary Corse, Emilio Cruz, Walter De Maria, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Jean Follett, Miles Forst, Robert Frank, Al Hansen, Michael Heizer, Tehching Hsieh & Linda Montano, Neil Jenney, Donald Judd, Alex Katz, Gary Kuehn, Yayoi Kusama, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Alfred Leslie, Lee Lozano, Robert Morris, Jan Müller, Bruce Nauman, Richard Nonas, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Larry Poons, David Rabinowitch, James Rosenquist, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Richard Serra, Richard Smith, Myron Stout, Kunié Sugiura, Sidney Tillim, John Tweddle, Tom Wesselmann, Neil Williams, Peter Young, Daisy Youngblood, John Zinsser
Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present an ambitious group exhibition dedicated to gallerist Richard Bellamy (1927-1998) and the circle of artists whose careers he launched and fostered.
Curated by Judith Stein, author of the recently-published Bellamy biography, Eye of the Sixties, this will be the first exhibition to explore the essential but little-known efforts of this visionary whose personal choices profoundly shaped the history of contemporary art. On view will be work from the 1950s through the 1990s by more than forty artists, among them Jo Baer, Mary Corse, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Jean Follett, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Richard Serra, and Tom Wesselmann. We expect this focus on Bellamy and his artists will bring important new insights into a history of taste that is still quite relevant.
Dick’s pioneering role in the developments of Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual art, and Op art started with Green Gallery, which he directed from 1960-65, and where he gave Oldenburg, Rosenquist and Wesselmann their uptown solo debuts, along with di Suvero, Lucas Samaras, and George Segal. At Green, Dick was the first to show the minimalist sculpture of Flavin, Judd, and Morris, as well as Larry Poons’s Op art paintings. In his later galleries, especially Oil & Steel, and in his behind-the-scenes advocacy, Bellamy championed Neil Jenney, Alfred Leslie, Walter De Maria, and Bruce Nauman (also all included in this exhibition).
Many rarely-seen and never-before-exhibited works will be on view in Deadeye Dick, including Alex Katz’s portrait of Bellamy, on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art; Heizer’s portraits of Bellamy’s backers, famed collectors Robert and Ethel Scull, and a remarkable group of drawings by Lee Lozano, as well as several of her letters to Dick, one of which constituted her conceptual and official withdrawal from the art world.
A reception will be held Tuesday, 12 September from 6 to 8 pm.
For reproduction requests and general inquiries, please contact the gallery at
212-966-5154 or info@peterfreemaninc.com.
