Biala and Brustlein

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of paintings by American artist Biala (1903 - 2000) and her husband Daniel Brustlein (1904 – 1996). The exhibition will be the first time the gallery explores the paintings of her lesser-known husband and their fertile creative life together.

The exhibition will comprise a group of oil paintings, many of Paris where the couple lived for over fifty years, starting in 1947. Others depict figures, including a double portrait by Brustlein seated with his wife on a bench in a landscape.

Biala, whose painting career spanned most of the 20th Century, developed a style that was a synthesis of the intimacy and light often associated with early French Modernism, and the painterly directness and active brush strokes of Abstract Expressionism. Brustlein’s paintings are likewise, direct, simplified, but often have a greater emphasis on the geometry of the architecture of Paris.

Biala was born in the town of Bialystok, Poland. In 1913 she immigrated to the United States with her mother and brother, Jack Tworkov. Brustlein was born in France and made his way to America, where he settled in New York, becoming a citizen in 1933. He gained attention as cartoonist for The New Yorker. Later, he started to paint full-time. Biala and Brustlein met in New York in 1940. They were married in 1943.

Biala’s paintings have been the subject of numerous gallery exhibitions in New York and Paris, and were included in major museum exhibitions including five Whitney Annuals. She had seven solo shows with the legendary Stable Gallery. Her work is in many museum collections in the United States and France,

The gallery exhibition coincides with Biala: Vision and Memory at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College. The show runs September 12-October 27.