Berry Campbell is pleased to announce Ann Purcell: The Seventies, an exhibition focusing on works created between 1975 and 1979. This exhibition examines a formative moment in Purcell’s career when she transitioned from Washington, D.C.’s intellectually charged artistic milieu to the New York art world. Produced over a decade of significant renewal in American painting, the works capture Purcell at a pivotal juncture: fully formed in her convictions but actively pushing into renewed engagement with expressive abstraction. During this period, Purcell explored the physical and improvisational possibilities of paint, balancing spontaneity and structure. Describing her approach as “thinking but not thinking, looseness and freedom along with control,” Purcell’s work reflects a painterly intelligence shaped by art history, exceptional mentors, and consistent explorations within abstraction. This exhibition marks Purcell’s fifth with Berry Campbell and follows recent acquisitions of her work by the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas, and The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
The significance of this period was recognized early. In 1976, Purcell was given a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which was a major institutional affirmation for an artist in her mid-thirties. The museum's chief curator, Jane Livingston, wrote in the accompanying catalogue that Purcell demonstrated "fluidity with a vast range of idioms," and described her as "among the most disciplined and prolific artists I have encountered," noting the "fresh, sometimes startlingly brutal, sometimes exquisitely refined works she manages to create in the continually ongoing process of her production." A critic reviewing a concurrent group show at the Corcoran observed that Purcell "may be the one painter here to achieve a personal mood," adding that she "draws and paints like an Abstract Expressionist, spreads pigment like a color field painter, uses color like a Darby Bannard or a Richard Diebenkorn, but adds a gentleness all her own."
Raised in Arlington, Virginia, and educated at the Corcoran College of Art and Design and George Washington University, Purcell came of age within one of the United States’ most intellectually demanding artistic environments. Before completing her degree, she studied independently in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she first exhibited her work in 1971 at Villa Roma Gallery. Exposure to Mexico’s artistic and architectural traditions, as well as its vibrant use of color and spatial sensibility, left a lasting impression on the artist’s visual language. Returning to Washington, D.C., Purcell worked closely with Washington Color School painter Gene Davis, who became both a mentor and lifelong friend. Through Davis, Purcell met artist and curator Jacob Kainen at the Smithsonian, with whom she frequently visited museums throughout Washington, studying and discussing historical masterpieces. These experiences contributed to Purcell’s sustained engagement with the history of painting and its evolving possibilities within contemporary abstraction.
In 1977, Purcell moved to New York City and entered an art world undergoing a renewed engagement with painting, gesture, and material experimentation. The move introduced Purcell to a broader contemporary dialogue on abstraction while reinforcing her commitment to an independent, process-driven practice. Her work from this moment forward explores what she calls the paradoxes inherent in abstraction (control and improvisation, structure and dissolution), and does so with a physicality and brilliant color palette that critics have long praised. In the mid-1970s, Benjamin Forgey described her “light-filled paintings” as “a delightful, sensual explosion.” By 1983, Dan Cameron, writing in Arts magazine, called her "a fervent disciple of modernism" and praised the way she brought together painting and drawing through the manipulation of "edge, mass, and composition in a single gesture."
Since 2013, Berry Campbell has represented Ann Purcell exclusively. Purcell's practice has been sustained by a remarkable network of institutional recognition. Her awards include grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Hereward Lester Cooke Foundation at the National Gallery of Art. Purcell’s work is included in the collections of major institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (FAMM), France, among many others.
