At the center of Berry Campbell Gallery’s presentation is an important example of Elaine de Kooning’s portraiture, Gandy Brodie (1973), a lively, gestural depiction of the artist’s friend and fellow downtown New York fixture. Priced at $450,000, the painting combines the spontaneous energy of Abstract Expressionism with a clear sense of character, a reminder of de Kooning’s remarkable versatility beyond her better-known association with the movement’s abstract painters.
A founding member of the avant-garde Artists’ Club in Greenwich Village, de Kooning was also an influential critic, writing early essays on artists including Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, and Franz Kline. Her renewed visibility comes amid a broader reassessment of women’s contributions to post-war abstraction, including Berry Campbell’s current exhibition of the artist, which brings her work into sharper focus and earned her a New York Times feature this fall.
In its booth, the New York gallery—whose program specializes in postwar American art and the women of Abstract Expressionism—places de Kooning in conversation with works by Janice Biala, Lynne Drexler, Judith Godwin, Dorothy Dehner, and others.
—Annabel Keenan, Artsy
