Peter Begley stands squarely on the principal concerns of sculpture. He deals with objects in actual space, not virtual objects in potential space. While artists working in two dimensions have attempted high-temperature intellectual arguments--interrogating structure rather than content; space rather than the constituencies of space; the organization of visual thinking rather than the objects of accomplished thought--sculptors have always had to contend with both. It is they who have learned to formulate the most salient questions concerning both the abstract principles of form and the material concerns of the world and are able to answer them gracefully, in any dimension.

Begley is one of the few young contemporary artists who begins with the foundations of sculpture and who understand the initial impulses to form. Both his works on paper and his cast-bronze sculptures inherit and combine the visual vocabulary of biomorphs and architecture. He moves between the two modes with an easy facility and a coherence of personal style, often blending them to the point at which they become indistinguishable. "Sculpture and Still Life" will be Dactyl Foundation's first one man exhibition of the millennium.

Peter H. Begley was born in Boston in 1958. He was educated at Phillips Academy, Andover, the University of Virginia and the New York Studio School. Peter Begley shows with Olaf Clasen in Cologne, Studio "S" and Politecnico in Rome, Elaine Benson in Bridgehampton, NY, Spazi in Housatonic, MA, and with Leonora Vega and Salander O'Reilly Galleries in New York. His work is to be found in public and private collections in Europe and the United States. Since 1986, Peter Begley has lived and worked in Rome.

Selected shows

1986 Group show Image Gallery, Stockbridge, Mass
1987 Group show Elaine Benson, Bridgehampton, NY
1988 Group show ART 54, New York
1989 Group show Studio S, Rome, Italy
1989 Group show Elain Benson Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY
1990 One man show Olaf Clasen Gallery, New York
1991 One man show Olaf Clasen Gallery, New York
1992 One man show Olaf Clasen Gallery, Cologne, Germany
1993 Group show Spazi Gallery, Housatonic, Mass
1994 Group show Politecnico, Rome, Italy
1995 Group show Spazi Gallery, Housatonic, Mass
1995 One man show Olaf Clasen Gallery, Cologne, Germany
1996 Group show Monique Knowlton, New York
1996 Group show Leonora Vega Gallery, New York
1997 Group show Elaine Benson Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY
1997 One man show Leonora Vega Gallery, New York
1998 Group show Leonora Vega gallery, New York
1998 One man show Salander O'Reilly Galleries, New York
1998 One man show Leonora Vega Gallery, New York
1999 Group show Elaine Benson Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY
2000 One man show Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York
2000 One man show Simon's Rock College, Great Barrington, MA
2000 One man show Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities, New York

Woman 1, 1997
Acrylic on Canvas
8 x 10 in.
Collection of Janice and Stanley Sussman

Woman 2, 1997
Acrylic on Canvas
8 x 10 in.
Collection of Janice and Stanley Sussman

Eve, 1996
Acrylic on Canvas
Private Collection

Kouros, 1996
Acrylic on Canvas
Private Collection

"Audrey Code at Dactyl Foundation"
Review Magazine
by Mark Daniel Cohen

The most salient quality of Audrey Code's paintings in this exhibition is their attempted fusion of past and present. In these works, color and form search out different epochs in art history to find their material. It is almost quaint, though neither frivolous nor precious, that in a time of postmodern pastiche of past modes of art, these very referential paintings are evidently lacking in all irony. They do not merely accommodate and remark upon lost styles; they adopt previous purposes. Their intent here is clearly serious.

The six paintings that make up this exhibition, curated by Neil Grayson, were selected to be a piece in technique and import. Each displays a single figure standing upright, surrounded by and cloaked in dynamic swirls and slashes of acrylic paint. The figures are drawn with something of the strength of classical study, but the use of color overlays the human form with the furious energy of abstract art. The color does not adumbrate the figure, nor does it contribute the depiction of added elements. It is spray, and chaos, and the only true drawing to be seen is of the figure, seeming to lie beneath the storm of paint. Although the artist's statement refers to process painting as the source of the technique, what looks to be more likely is action painting, or as it is more commonly known, abstract expressionism. The energy of her surface is reminiscent of nothing so much as Jackson Pollack.

Code in her statement claims Rubens as an influence on her figure drawing. Her figures have something of the fleshy rotundity that marked his work, and her painting does reflect Rubens' splotchy vitality of color. But there is something else here. Her drawing does not have Rubens' sinuous, vibrant line. She seems closer to Italian Renaissance figuration: there is an emphasis on balance, many of the figures demonstrate "contrapposto" (the stance in which one foot bears the weight of the figure), they have a gentleness of motion, as if only starting to commit their gestures. In one work, RISING SPIRIT, there is a distinguishable resemblance to Michelangelo's drawing THE RISEN CHRIST from the Windsor Castle. From the title of Code's painting this reference appears intentional and intended to be perfectly clear. Code apparently knows her art history sufficiently well to take on the task she has assigned herself.

The interleaving of abstract coloration and the most traditional figure work was selected for the exhibition, according to Grayson, to reveal the intersection of form and chaos, of structure and the indescribable. These subjects are themselves traditional concerns of art, and the combination of them seems a particularly modern issue. The problem is that the intersection of the themes is partial. Only inconsistently is there a coalescing of the two styles, drawn from different periods of history, and of their two themes.

In EVE, for one example, the slight movement of the figure seems to churn the paint to a blizzard of hurling pinks, teals, and flesh tones, as if the very substance of Eve's body were being thrown to the gale of her disembodied action, as if the classical conception of the integrated individual were being pulled apart by the torrential forces of the modern world. But in other paintings, the figure merely lies below the flung paint, and it seems as if the human form were to create the designs, again simply being observed through a spattered scrim.

In short, at times here the historical styles simply layer each other, and their adduced artistic concerns do not join to make a single version nor a single statement. Nevertheless, there is nothing lacking in the way of aesthetic ambition. The intent - to find the fusion of form and formlessness, to locate the unity of surface structure with the inchoate depths - is a serious one. In combining Renaissance figures with abstraction of color, Code has welded together not past and present, but two styles from the past - one from five centuries back and the other from nearly half a century again. However, there is enough promise here to make one look forward to her further work, to see if she will take the next step: achieving the new vision, leaving behind the past and accomplishing the "now."

DeDe Fedrizzi, Brutal Photographie
October 1997

Wreckage, 1997 c-print, edition of 14, 20 x 24 in.

Untitled 2, 1997 c-print, edition of 14, 20 x 24 in.

Jim Klein
April 1997

Untitled 5, 1996
Ground pigment and acrylic polymer medium on paper
23 1/4 x 53 3/4 in.
Private Collection.

Untitled 1, 1996
Ground pigment and acrylic polymer medium on paper
23 1/4 x 53 3/4 in.

Untitled 9, 1996
Ground pigment and acrylic polymer medium on paper
23 1/4 x 53 3/4 in.

Stephanie Rose
March 6 - April 10, 1999

Ted Mooney, 1996
Oil on Canvas
68 x 42 1/2 in.

This marks the first exhibition of portraits by an artist whose reputation was established as an abstract painter. Six portraits will be shown along with a large abstract painting to provide a context. Portrait subjects include: John Ashbery, Ted Mooney, Melissa Errico, John Ash, Tom Bridenbach, Yannis Dellatolas, and Elizabeth Schub.