Saturday January 17, 2026 Philip Douglas Fine Art opens a new group exhibition We Stand On The Shoulders of Giants featuring eighteen artists born & brought up over six decades demonstrating that a life lived making art involves taking influences that came before, making them new again. New York School painters Nick Carone (1917-2010), Dan Rice (1926-2003), Jean Cohen (1927-2013), Fred Mitchell (1923-2013) and Melville Price (1920-1970) thrived during the ground breaking era of the 1940s-1950s when abstract expressionism and experimentation became the focus of art making. Nick Carone, a first generation New York School painter was widely respected & a  forceful AbEx/figurative painter & painting instructor and the driving force behind the legendary Stable Gallery as the galley’s (mostly) unofficial gallery director. It was he that chose many of the artists that participated in the Stable Gallery’s legendary career making annual exhibitions between 1953-1960. Melville Price was a first generation AB Ex painter and painting instructor. Born in Kingston, New York he was active from the 1940s to 1970 under the spell of first wave American modernism and participated in the artist’s division of the Works Project Administration of the late 1930s & early 1940s. Jean Cohen and Fred Mitchell - both painters and instructors were exhibiting members at the highly influential Tanager Gallery that thrived in New York’s East Village from 1952 to 1962 as a cooperative gallery experiment where artists ran the gallery and curated their own exhibitions. Tanager Gallery changed what a contemporary art gallery could be. Dan Rice came to New York in 1956 after ten years as a student & instructor at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he studied with and became close to titans of post war American abstraction.

Painter, art polymath and instructor Lucio Pozzi is today active in his ninth decade having grown up in 1930s Milan. Moving to New York in the 1960s he came under the spell of American post war experimental/theatrical art influences, Arte Provera. Contemporary painters Farrell Brickhouse, Donna Moylan, Louis Brawley, David Becker, Jim Denney and Claude Carone were all born between 1949 to 1959. Their painting & teaching careers have thrived in New York and nationally since the 1970s and are variously influenced by Post War painters, installation experimentation, sculpture, Post Modernism, environmental concerns and the anything goes post 9/11 reordering that brought forth personal story telling into art in a way that allows figurative/abstract content to thrive today. Denise and Bob Oehl are photographers that embrace old school analog technique and whose pictures often become abstracted illusionary compositions. Katharine Umsted, Allyson Strafella and Jennifer Wynne Reeves were born in the 1960s. Katharine Umsted’s sculptural installations carry a thread of history, places we seem to have been to, lives that have been lived. Allyson Strafella’s delicate works on paper or “drawings” are punched out laboriously on a reconfigured vintage typewriter creating  compositions that riff on colorful minimalism, quietude and silent observation of the spirit and contain a modernist appeal. Jennifer Wynne Reeves mixed all of the above in her shortened art making life to create collaged “paintings” that tell stories about relationships, independence, misogyny and dying and that led her work to imbue a sense of hope, modernism and positivity. Ben Pritchard fully embraces the AB Ex idiom of the 1940s/1960s and fills his works with abstracted balance, tension and layered composition creating super charged surfaces.   

The exhibition runs through February 15, 2026.