Tom Betthauser
Ain Cocke
Alexander Kroll
Michael Mancari
Craig Taylor

new haven

April 16 – May 29, 2016
Artist Reception: Saturday, April 16, 2016, 3 – 6 p.m.

CB1 Gallery is pleased to present new haven, a group exhibition featuring five painters who all attended Yale University in New Haven, CT. The exhibition opens on April 16 and continues through May 29.

For certain artists, all roads, and certain train tracks, lead to New Haven, and Yale University. Such is the case with the five painters featured in this exhibition.

TOM BETTHAUSER (MFA 2012) arrived from the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA 2010); AIN COCKE (MFA 2004) from California State University, Long Beach (BFA 2002). CRAIG TAYLOR and MICHAEL MANCARI were classmates (MFA 1998), after receiving BFAs from the Maine College of Art (Taylor) and the Maryland Institute College of Art (Mancari). ALEXANDER KROLL did his undergraduate work in New Haven (BA, 2004), receiving his MFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 2008.

Three of the new haven artists exhibited here are abstract painters and two are representational, but all five present work that has a serious intellectual underpinning. Michael Mancari’s colorful canvases conjure memories of the past, peeling away those layers to expose the hidden image. Alexander Kroll’s work investigates the poetics of the pictorial space. Craig Taylor combines the language of abstraction with the format of a portrait or bust, marks traverse intensely layered surfaces, coalescing into an image of the bust creating complex viewing experience. Tom Betthauser’s tightly rendered paintings show a tenderness of rendering which coats his observation with a layer of sentimentality. Finally, Ain Cocke’s lurid and flamboyantly “traditional” portraits of male World Wars I and II era soldiers recall Rococo artists such as Boucher and Fragonard.

These five artists also speak to Los Angeles, and CB1 Gallery, in particular. CB1 Gallery was the first commercial gallery in Los Angeles to show Alexander Kroll starting in 2010, with solo exhibitions in 2011 and 2012. Craig Taylor has shown with CB1 Gallery in 2013 and 2015 and Ain Cocke is scheduled for his first CB1 Gallery solo exhibition in 2017. Plus, we have recently become interested in the work of Tom Betthauser and Michael Mancari, both are recent new residents to Los Angeles.

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