Mitchell Algus Gallery (Exhibitions & Information)
email: office@mitchellalgusgallery.com
tel: 516-639-4918

Gerhardt Liebmann

May 11 – July 27, 2024

The Mitchell Algus Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by Gerhard Liebmann (1928 – 1989) opening on Saturday, May 11 from 5 – 7 PM. The exhibition will continue until Saturday, July 27. Gallery hours will be 2 – 5 PM, Thursday – Saturday and by appointment. The Gerhard Liebmann exhibition is in collaboration with Westwood Gallery NYC.

Gerhard Liebmann’s paintings are little known. The artist, who was born in rural Oregon in 1928, was an accomplished student and polymath attending Harvard University as an undergraduate. Liebmann continued his graduate studies under Walter Gropius, earning a master’s degree in architecture. University was followed by a period of peripatetic work and study in Europe, military service, and freelance work as an independent architect.

Gerhardt Liebmann settled in New York in the early 1960s, taking up residence in a SoHo loft and embarking on a career as a painter. His first paintings, three of which are in the current show, are subtle and meticulously detailed architectural panoramas composed of innumerable bricks. In the 1970s Liebmann began painting softly surreal visions of SoHo roof tops, providing a significant addition to the genre of urban scene painting. Liebmann’s work represents a unique perspective on the motifs of artists such as Martha Diamond and Robert Moskowitz two painters whose work has recently recieved significant notice. The artist’s paintings also evoke a metropolitan perspective on the littoral landscapes of the neo-Romantic painter Leonid Berman.

Supplementing Gerhardt Liebmenn’s painting are photographs of Trisha Brown’s SoHo roof top dance performances in the 1970s taken by Babette Mangolte and Peter Moore. In addition, scenes from Louis Johnson’s rediscovered roof top dances from the 1960s that recently appeared in the New York Times as an Op-Docs feature are included.

Gerhart Liebmann was an important figure in the SoHo Artists Association, working as an activist seeking AIR status allowing artists to remain in their lofts. He was a principal speaker, often alongside Donald Judd, in many city planning commission hearings. The artist, who died of AIDS in 1989 was a significant part of the city’s queer community, taking hundred hundreds of photographs of men in his loft in the late 1960’s and early 1970s.According to Carl Morse “Liebmann obsessively and privately photographed in identical ritual positions and locations in his SOHO loft an entire generation of the hottest men of New York City’s SOHO and West Village, creating in albums the portrait of the last sexually free generation of homosexual men.” Scattered after his death, these photographs were collected by Morse from flea markets and porn shops and privately published an edition of 10 as “EROS UNBOUND – 27 Assemblages; derived from the clandestine legacy of a SOHO gentleman,” one of which is included in this show.