Work by Mary Grigoriadis acquired by The Currier Museum of Art and The Rollins Museum of Art

January 1, 2024 - January 1, 2025
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 Mary Grigoriadis's work, Night Bloom (c. 1985) was recently acquired by the Rollins Museum of Art at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL as part of The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Gift of Barbara '68 and Theodire 68' Alfond. The painting is currently on view in the exhibition, What's New? Recent Acquisitions. A 360 degree virtual tour of the exhibition is available here.

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Mary Grigoriadis's work, Prairie Song (1980) was recently acquired by the The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH through the Henry Melville Fuller Fund. The painting is also currently on view.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

For over five decades, Mary Grigoriadis has pushed the bounds of oil painting by pursuing new approaches to composition, color, and ornament in her works on raw linen and canvas, which reveal an orchestration of concise brushstrokes. Bridging multiple art movements in mid-century New York, Grigoriadis was a founding member of A.I.R., one of the first women’s art galleries, and exhibited as part of the Pattern and Decoration (P+D) group. P+D elevated the motifs of decoration to fine art, and Grigoriadis married these references with the formal, exacting sentiments of a minimalist painter. Within this historical context, her painterly language and style demonstrate a unique approach to art-making—one that considered rigorous, process-based painting alongside the liberatory initiatives of her time.

Grigoriadis devised her methodical approach as early as the 1960s, when she worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. There, she was front row to the development of the 1966 exhibition Systemic Painting, which included works by Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, and Robert Ryman, among others. Their conceptual works involved self- imposed limits and a controlled handling of paint, and Grigoriadis took these ideas to her own experiments on the canvas. Throughout her oeuvre, Grigoriadis pushed the material qualities of paint to create works that are distinctly her own. In her words, the intention of her textured, impasto application was “to create an opulent surface where the physical properties of oil paint are explicitly conveyed, particularly its wetness, flow, and skin.”

Mary Grigoriadis has exhibited in museums including The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Aldrich Museum, CT; the Queens Museum, NY; the U.S. Embassies in Belgrade, Pretoria, Cape Town and Athens; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece; the Kresge Art Museum, MI; and The Bronx Museum, NY. In 2019, her paintings were included in the seminal historical survey of P+D artists, With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972- 1985 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles and The Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale- On- Hudson, NY. Her work is represented in public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, VA; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU, MI; Chase Manhattan Bank Art Collection, NY; Parrish Art Museum, NY; U.S. Embassy Annex in Athens; Vorres Museum, Greece; Derfner Museum, NY; Guild Hall Museum, NY; Smithsonian Museum, Washington, DC; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Mary Grigoriadis is represented by Accola Griefen Fine Art.
  

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Works in both the Rollins Museum of Art and the Currier Museum of Art permanent collections were acquired through the artist's 2023 solo exhibition at James Cohan which was organized as a partnership between Accola Griefen Fine Art and James Cohan.