One Art Space has always had a talent for choosing the right artist for the right moment. The Tribeca gallery's recent tribute to Chuck Connelly — the late downtown painter whose canvases drew admiration from Martin Scorsese to Nick Nolte — was precisely that: a show that felt both necessary and overdue.
"Chuck Connelly: Tribeca's Midnight Parade — When Art Runs Wild" ran through Sunday, May 3, at 23 Warren Street, a few blocks from the Franklin Street loft where Connelly once lived and worked. The exhibition was co-curated by his widow, Adrienne Connelly, and MaryAnn Giella McCulloh, co-owner and gallerist of One Art Space, alongside Mei Fung.
“"Animals in the Street" serves as both a vivid snapshot of Tribeca in an earlier era and a reflection of Chuck Connelly's singular ability to blend figuration, symbolism and emotion into scenes that feel at once surreal and unmistakably real.”Exhibition Description
At the center of the show was "Animals in the Street," a 1994 painting that operates as both a portrait of a neighborhood and a declaration of the artist's vision. In it, the people of Tribeca move through their daily routines transformed into animals — a judge becomes a fierce lion in a trench coat heading toward Chambers Street; Connelly himself appears as a horse standing quietly to the side in bohemian dress, observing the rush around him. The work captures the neighborhood as it once was: loose, creative, operating on its own terms, before the strollers and the sushi restaurants and the hedge fund offices arrived.
The painting's scale and density reward extended looking. Movement, wit, and something that might be described as urban tenderness run through every corner of the canvas. Connelly was working at a moment when Tribeca still felt like a neighborhood rather than a zip code, and "Animals in the Street" preserves that texture with the specificity of someone who knew those blocks intimately.
Connelly's work has appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. What gave this exhibition its particular weight was its location — a few minutes' walk from where the paintings were conceived.
Works on view alongside the centerpiece included "Father and Son" (1992), "Spilled Paint" (1994), and "Idiot Box" (2014), each displaying the restless energy and technical authority that characterized Connelly's career. The show confirmed what his admirers have long known: that his reputation, never fully corralled by the market or the academy during his lifetime, continues to grow in his absence.
The opening drew a room that reflected the particular social texture of downtown New York — artists and collectors, old friends and new admirers, people who knew the work and people encountering it for the first time. Among those who gathered were Adrienne Connelly, MaryAnn Giella McCulloh, Mei Fung, Matt Jones, Gene Pritsker, Gerald DeCock, Eric Berg, Ken Howard, Michael Fredo, Will Hilfiger, Dr. Robi Ludwig, Henry Henzel, Connor Henzel, and Rick Davidman.
One Art Space, which opened in May 2011 and has presented work by Shepard Fairey, Al Diaz, Andrew Salgado, and Purvis Young, remains one of the few galleries in downtown Manhattan that consistently delivers on the promise of its name.
For more information: www.chuckconnelly.org | www.oneartspace.com
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