NEW YORK, NY.- An exhibition of Figurative Expressionist paintings from the 1960s and 1980s that unflinchingly reflect the artist’s outlook on life then, as relatable to our current-day script, opened at the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer Street, on Friday, March 9. Most of these pieces have not been shown in New York since the 1980s; some have never been displayed. The exhibition will remain on view through April 10.

Carmen Cicero’s exhibition title, Battle of the Sexes 1965-1982, could be interpreted as provocation that divulges his decades long angst and agitation producing work revealing undisguised issues and storylines. Today these cutting-edge works prompt scrutiny in light of contemporary clashes between the sexes.

The artist arrived in New York in 1971 after a devastating fire that destroyed his studio in Englewood, New Jersey. He lost all of his canvases, press clippings and other records in the flames, but he was able to begin again in his new loft on the Bowery. The Bowery, at that time, was filled with flophouses and homeless men and was New York’s "Skid Row.” Cicero began to formulate his ideas into new themes from which he produced colorful, manic paintings, like giant drawings of comic book pages.

These enigmatic paintings are deeply personal and expose the surreal alliances that the artist postulates among his characters, replete with double entendres. The results are original, quirky and hypnotic. He brings a remarkable inventiveness to his work, and his symbolism stirs a sense of mystery and foreboding.

Ever faithful to his subjects, Cicero’s language of expression pointedly describe comic apparitions with candor that reflect his reverence for life’s veracities and vagaries.

Some of the artist’s paintings teeter on the edge of total abstraction, though he never allows visual language to lose contact with his motif. His images are hard-won. They start from the subject and push detail forcibly to the edge via expressive brushwork.

Cicero’s use of humor is coupled with his search for deeper meaning. The stinging bluntness in the artist’s imagery produces an effect of eerie quietude in the viewer. He has always been concerned with what he observes as disturbing occurrences between the sexes, which in our time have become more commonplace.

Cicero is the master storyteller, with endless commentaries about life, as seen in his oversize canvas entitled Battle of the Sexes I, 1972, in which a female appears startled and falls backward from a physical blow delivered by an angry male. Or, in Flying Down to Rio, 1982, in which interaction between a bare breasted female and a masculine seducer (does this woman enjoy his caresses?). These evocative scenarios suggestive of continuing issues between the sexes are painted with Cicero’s meticulous detail with bursting contours, blazing color, and spontaneous yet erratic brushstrokes. Suspension of emotion is in each Cicero work, as if one becomes captive awaiting a turn of events.

A native of Newark, New Jersey, Cicero holds a BA from Newark State Teachers College and an MFA from Montclair State University. He lives in New York City and summers in Truro on Cape Cod. He is also an accomplished jazz musician.

His work is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collections,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art,
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Newark Museum, Montclair Museum of Art,
National Academy Museum, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA; West Publishing Company, St. Paul, MN; and Musei Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

In 2016 Carmen Cicero received the Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2012 Carmen Cicero received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and in 2007.he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. A monograph, “The Art of Carmen Cicero,” was published in 2013 by Schiffer Publishing in Atglen, PA.