Marlborough New York | Red Grooms: Ninth Street Women meet The Irascibles | New York | Mar 16 – May 6, 2023
March 16 – May 6, 2023
Red Grooms: Ninth Street Women meet The Irascibles
Marlborough New York
In-Person Viewing:
Marlborough New York, 545 West 25th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 16th, 6-8pm
On the second floor will be a new series of work by the artist Red Grooms. Inspired by the 2018 novel by Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women, Grooms has recollected and re-constructed history through painting, merging the infamous 1951 photograph from Life magazine of the Irascibles with the women of Ninth Street.
“The Sparkling Amazons,” the term coined by Thomas Hess, described five women who revolutionized the modern art world in postwar America, comprised of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. The Irascibles, or Irascible 18, were the labels given to a group of American abstract painters who in 1950, penned an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to express their intense disapproval and commitment to boycott the museum’s exhibition American Painting Today: 1950. The subsequent media coverage and iconic photo of the group published in Life magazine in 1951 gave the Irascibles notoriety and helped to canonize the term ‘Abstract Expressionism.’
