NEW YORK, NY.- Marlborough Gallery announced an exhibition of new works by the inimitable American artist Red Grooms. The exhibition, entitled Torn from the Pages, opened October 24 and continues through December 1, 2012. Since Ruckus Manhattan, his first widely acclaimed exhibition at Marlborough in 1976, Grooms has staked his claim as one of America’s most original, inventive, and popular artists. In this exhibition he turns his creativity towards other established artists, making them his subjects. The exhibition comprises 24 small mixed media constructions that examine influential artists from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Gerhard Richter, Leonora Carrington, Edward Hopper, Natalia Goncharova, Edouard Vuillard, Erich Heckel, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, John Marin, Richard Prince, René Magritte, Henri Matisse, Dorothea Tanning, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Cezanne, Eugène Atget, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon, and Yves Tanguy.

In a new take on the artist’s hallmark dimensional constructions which compound painting and sculpture, Grooms incorporates an element of collage into the works in this exhibition. Integrating pages from magazines with watercolor, acrylic, ink, and other media he creates perceptive portraits of well-known artists and places them within the environment of their own works. For example, in the wryly humorous Fifteen Minutes, Mr. Warhol, 2012, Warhol stands directly in front of three of his prominent screen prints with his camera in hand, seemingly unaware of the viewer. In Something Fishy (Magritte), 2011, Grooms fuses the bust of Magritte, who wears his ubiquitous bowler hat, with the torso and legs of one of Magritte’s female nudes, a tongue-in-cheek allusion to Magritte’s famous 1934 painting of a fish with human legs. In another astutely imagined work, Joan’s Blues (Joan Mitchell), 2012, Grooms presents the viewer with a three quarter view of the artist with her expressive, emotional style filling out the background. Mitchell’s gaze directly confronts the viewer while her torso dissolves into Abstract Expressionist brush strokes.

Writing about Grooms in Sculpture Magazine, the art critic Clare Henry said, “A superb draftsman with a keen, unforgiving eye yet easy going, light touch, he translates a lifetime’s acute observation (laced with strong satire) into bright Pop Americana with universal appeal. Caricature is often vicious and Grooms can offer a no-holds barred message with bite. But he stops short of the malicious in favor of the benign commentary on human frailties with which we can all identify. Such humanity and honesty imbues his stereotypes with conviction.”

Red Grooms was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1937 and has lived and worked in New York since 1957. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the New School for Social Research in New York City and at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, MA.

Grooms’ art has been the subject of three retrospective shows: the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia in 1985, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, in 1987, and the National Academy of Design, NY, in 2001, specifically devoted to his graphic work. This last exhibition traveled to eight other venues in the United States through 2004. He has also been honored with several important survey exhibitions, most recently at the Hudson River Museum in 2007, the Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY in 2005, The Frist Center for Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, and the Katonah Museum of Art, NY in 2003. Grooms has received numerous awards and commissions throughout his career, including the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Academy of Design in 2003, and was an Open House New York honoree in 2011.

Grooms’ work can be found in over forty public institutions, including The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Denver Art Museum, CO; Fort Worth Art Museum, TX; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.