Everything is Paintable

At 78 years old, Mel Leipzig hustles a four-foot canvas out of his white van and sets up for the dayʼs project; he is painting a young female tattoo artist in her shop. This marks the first of 8 weekly visits he will make before the canvas is ready to exhibit. On Thursday, March 27th, Gallery Henoch will open a four-week exhibition of Mr. Leipzigʼs portraits. Margaret OʼReilly, Curator of Fine Art at the New Jersey State Museum, selected the 22 paintings to be exhibited at Gallery Henoch thru April 19, 2014. Art critic Dan Bischoff notes: “For more than four decades Mel has stood in Trenton, New Jersey and painted the worlds around him: Fast cooks in their diners, jacketed waiters among their tables, students at the college where he taught for nearly half a century, fellow artists in their studios. Leipzig is a portraitist, but he doesnʼt just produce recognizable likenesses. He paints, as artist Carl Hazlewood once put it, “rooms” — all the stuff that makes up a personʼs home or workplace. More often than not, that makes a truer portrait than the subjectʼs physiognomy.” Leipzig does not have a studio; he paints from life on location. Leipzig sets up and breaks down daily, returning at scheduled times. In any given week he may paint at five different locations. Leipzig paints quickly, in acrylic on canvas, allowing him to complete canvases as small as four feet square in as little as four weeks, although, most pieces average eight to twelve. In 1990 he began working in a limited palette of four colors (red, yellow, blue and white). In 2013 he introduced a fifth color, black, to his practice. In recent years the artist has begun to make diptychs and triptychs of his subjects. Leipzig will paint multiple locations that reference the subject, giving the viewer greater insight into their world. In the portrait of RUSH HOLT AND MARGARET LANCEFIELD, a triptych, the center panel shows the politician & wife at home. The two outside panels show a pristinely organized New Jersey office counterweighted by a slightly chaotic desk in Washington, DC. This marks Leipzigʼs seventh solo exhibition at Gallery Henoch that has represented the artist for 30 years. Mel Leipzig was born in Brooklyn in 1935 and resides in Trenton, NJ where he was a professor of Painting and Art History at Mercer County Community College until 2013. He studied at the Cooper Union and at Yale, with Joseph Albers and Neil Welliver. The latter encouraged Leipzig at a time when abstraction dominated the visual arts. Leipzig has had over 45 one-man shows at museums and art centers in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey. He has had multiple exhibits at the New Jersey State Museum. National Academy of Arts and Letters honored him in 2003. Shortly after he was elected into the National Academy in 2006. In 2013 PBS and NJN began airing a documentary about the artist titled MEL LEIPZIG: EVERYTHING IS PAINTABLE. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Academy Museum and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City. Additionally, New Jersey State Museum, Montclair Art Museum, the Morris Museum, the Noyes Museum, the Jane Voorhes Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers and the Jersey City Museum among other museums have collected paintings. “His sense of Mysterious emotional tension in strongly characterized ordinary people makes him perhaps, the Chekhov of Trenton.” – Peter Schjeldahl, New York Times ...”One of the most individual American portrait painters of his generation. Indeed, he is among the very few artists of our current scene who seems to have the ability to say something new and interesting about the familiar and over familiar subject of informal portraiture.” – Victoria Donoho, The Philadelphia Enquirer

Visit

555 W 25th St

Chelsea, NY