NEW YORK, NY.- Betty Cuningham Gallery will present an exhibition of recent paintings by Jake Berthot, on view from January 6 – February 19, 2011. This will be the third solo exhibition for the artist at the gallery, located at 541 West 25th Street, New York, NY. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Thursday, January 6th from 6 – 8pm.

Included in the exhibition will be approximately 10 paintings, ranging in size from 12 x 12 inches to 39 x 48 inches. Moving away from the darker palette seen in his last show, Berthot continues to paint quiet meditative canvases, suggestive of landscapes. The landscape reference entered into his purely abstract paintings in 1996 when he moved from New York City to a home in the Catskills region of upstate New York.

In a recent talk, given before an audience at SUNY Ulster County Community College, Berthot refers to his work as “experiential”, or routed in experience, both his abstract work of the 1960’s and 1970’s as well as his recent work. Ultimately Berthot’s work is as much about place as it is about presence. In the current show, each work has an emerging image, whether it is a protruding rock or huge mountain, a small sapling or grand tree, and in the case of two still life paintings, a skull. Also featured in this exhibition are ten works on paper.

Berthot’s work can be seen in a host of notable museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York City. Nationally, his work can be found in the collections of The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, the Museum of Art, University of California, Berkeley, CA, among numerous others.

Jake Berthot was born in Niagara Falls, NY in 1939. He attended the New School for Social Research and Pratt Institute in the early 1960’s and has been exhibiting in New York since the early 1970’s. The artist has held teaching positions at Cooper Union, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and currently is teaching at The School of Visual Arts. He has received a number of awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1983 and an Academy Institute Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992. The artist currently lives and works in upstate New York.