WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC was pleased to present “Artists on the Bowery Part 1,” an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and mixed media by Bowery artists Carmen Cicero and Alan Steele. This was the first exhibition in a series focused on Contemporary artists living and working on the Bowery in New York City, curated by James Cavello as part of the core gallery program. On view from May 28 through July 13, the exhibition includes twelve works by Cicero and Steele.
The two artists represent polar opposites on the spectrum of the art movements that made the Bowery an incubator for artists since the 1950s. Cicero’s intense Figurative Expressionism reflects both personal experiences and the raw emotion of downtown streets, while Steele’s Geometric Abstraction with its clean lines and its programmatic non-objectiveness is analytical, meditative and purposefully removed from the neighborhood hum. Exhibited together for the first time, the two artists manifest the constant dialectic of the two opposing forces of Apollonian and Dionysian that shape the downtown art scene. Both artists represent the past, the present and the future of the Bowery Arts District, as they continue to work from their longtime studios.