NEW YORK, NY.- C24 Gallery announces the move to a dynamic twostory ground floor gallery space in a stunning new building on West 24th Street. The new gallery boasts 5,000 square feet on two floors with an atrium rising twenty feet adorned with a skylight.

How Many Miles to Babylon, curated by Peter Frank is the inaugural exhibition commemorating the long-awaited re-opening of the grand gallery space. How Many Miles is on view through February 17th, 2016.

The artists in the exhibition include Chris de Boschnek, Marc Dennis, Jedd Garet, and Geraldine Neuwirth from New York and Fatemeh Burnes, F. Scott Hess, Heather Gwen Martin, and Lezley Saar from Los Angeles.

“How Many Miles to Babylon acknowledges painting as a touchstone of vitality in America’s two largest art centers,” Frank observes. “The history of painting and the history of experimentation reflect in the work of these eight artists, based at opposite ends of the country but united in their devotion to an obdurate and magical medium.”

Frank views the opportunity provided him by C24 Gallery to realize this show “as a way of celebrating independent thinking and quirky mindsets while honoring tradition – or, rather, traditions.” The art in How Many Miles to Babylon ranges from hyper-realism to non-objective abstraction, narrative figuration to painting-as-object, surrealist space to digital capture.

“Is there a New York school of painting anymore, or a Los Angeles school?” muses Frank. “There are certainly eddies of like-minded activity occurring in both places, but in the age of accessibility, of cyber-connections and frequent flying, the art world has arguably become one immense cosmopolitan network. There is, for better or worse, no zone of ignorance, only pockets of avoidance. These eight artists do not work in a vacuum, but, as mature talents, they each know what it is they need to paint.”

C24 Gallery’s new space will allow the artists in its program to continue a strong presence in the art world while promoting the intrinsic value of each artist’s work. Focusing on building the artist’s careers the gallery will reinforce its presence in the art community. C24 Gallery’s new home will allow the gallery to serve theirr artists and clients more completely.

Peter Frank (USA) is an American art critic, curator, and poet who lives and works in Los Angeles. He is Associate Editor of Fabrik magazine and a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. Frank has served as Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum and as art critic for Angeleno magazine and the LA Weekly. In his native New York Frank was art critic for the Village Voice and the SoHo Weekly News. He is author of several books and numerous catalogues.