MOUNTAINVILLE, N.Y.- A special exhibition comprising more than eighty of Richard Bellamy’s photographs of the sculptures of Mark di Suvero and more than twenty works by di Suvero opens at the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, on June 8, 2005. Richard Bellamy and Mark di Suvero is the first exhibition to bring together the work of these two close friends and, as the exhibition reveals, kindred spirits.

Organized by David R. Collens, director and curator of the Storm King Art Center, the exhibition will remain on view through the end of the 2005 Storm King season, on November 13. It will reopen for the 2006 season, from April 1 through November 15, 2006, with several changes in photographs, drawings, and sculptures.

From 1975 until his death in 1998, Richard Bellamy, a legendary art dealer and close friend of di Suvero, created what amounts to a personal photographic narrative of di Suvero’s work, taking pictures not only of finished sculptures installed at Storm King and at various locations in Europe, but also of the artist at work in his three studios and of the di Suvero team as it worked on installations around the world.

Bellamy’s photographs will be on view in Storm King’s museum building, where they will be displayed to best illuminate his vision. One gallery, for example, will focus on sculpture in landscape, and will reveal his deep understanding of color, as seen in such details as the juxtaposition of an orange-colored sculpture against a blue sky. Another gallery will feature photographs taken in European cities, including Venice and Paris; these explore the relationship of sculpture to architecture.

Seven small-scale di Suvero sculptures will also be installed in the museum building, offering viewers the unique opportunity to see Bellamy’s photographs in close proximity to work that he himself felt passionate about. (In fact, he exhibited the sculptures and photographs together in his Oil and Steel Gallery, in New York City.) Seven drawings by di Suvero that relate to specific sculptures in the Storm King collection will also be on view. Outdoors, on the patio and the lawn near the museum building, six sculptures by di Suvero will be installed against the backdrop of the Hudson Highlands. One of these, Shang (formerly Gateway, 1984–85), was exhibited in Storm King’s 1985 di Suvero exhibition. It will be installed for the exhibition in the same location as it was twenty years ago. In the second-floor gallery of the Museum, visitors viewing Bellamy’s large 1985 photograph and di Suvero’s drawing of the work will therefore be able to look out a nearby window and simultaneously observe the photograph and outdoor installation. Storm King’s di Suvero fields will be enhanced by several large-scale sculptures that have never or only rarely been on public exhibition. Among these are Beethoven’s Quartet (2003), which has never before been exhibited, and Origins (2001–04), which has never been on view in the United States. Together, these and other works by the artistprovide a rare opportunity to see di Suvero’s recent work in a single location.

By bringing together Bellamy’s photographs and di Suvero’s work, Richard Bellamy and Mark di Suvero aims not only to offer visitors a glimpse of the close working relationship between two important figures in the history of modern art, but also to reveal new ways of viewing both early and recent work by di Suvero.

Richard Bellamy - Richard Bellamy (1927–98) was widely celebrated as a dealer who viewed the world much as an artist does. He was one of the first to show the work of Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Lucas Samaras, and Richard Serra, and he is credited with helping to launch a generation of post-Abstract Expressionist artists. In 1960, Bellamy founded the Green Gallery, where the inaugural exhibition was a show of wood constructions by Mark di Suvero. The Gallery closed in 1965, and Bellamy became a private art dealer before opening the Oil and Steel Gallery, in 1980. From 1983 until his death in 1998, Bellamy represented di Suvero exclusively, and assisted with major exhibitions of his work at Storm King, as well as in France, Germany, and Italy.

Mark di Suvero - Mark di Suvero (b. 1933) is one of the most important American artists to emerge from the Abstract Expressionist era. He began showing his sculpture in the late 1950s, and his work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the Unites States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. His sculptures have also been exhibited in city-wide exhibitions in Paris, France; Venice, Italy; New York, New York; Stuttgart, Germany; and Nice and Valence, France, and he was the first living artist to have an exhibition in the Tuilleries Gardens, in Paris. The Storm King Art Center mounted major exhibitions of di Suvero’s work in 1985 and again in 1995 and 1996. U.S. cities with permanent installations of di Suvero sculptures include Baltimore, Maryland; Dallas and Houston, Texas; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Los Angeles, California; Minneapolis, Minnesota; St. Louis, Missouri; San Francisco, California; South Bend, Indiana; Toledo, Ohio; and Washington, D.C. Di Suvero’s work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Storm King Art Center, among many other institutions worldwide.