Sidney Gross

Sidney Gross (died in 1969, at the age of 48) was an American artist and painter. His early style was influenced by the Social realism. He also drew on the Surrealist Movement that was just beginning the year he was born. By the time he was twenty, he was painting distinctively urban surrealism, while producing critically admired portraits, something he continued to do during his lifetime.

Career Late in the 1940s and early into the 1950s, he experimented with various forms of abstract expressionism, including what one critic called amorphorism. These soft, diffuse, often numbered abstractions bore the title ‘Dusky’.

He continued to produce realistic portraits and semi-abstract portraits of the landscape of New York City. By the mid 1950s, he was producing large and dynamic works of Abstract Expressionism and finding a cliental at a time when other Abstract Expressionist artists were forced to band together to exhibit. Around 1960, his UFO and Probe Series began to include controlled abstractions against hard edge geometric fields of colors. In 1968, he had a joint exhibit with Mario Cooper at Lehigh University Art Gallery organized by Francis Quirk. At that time Lehigh purchased one of his UFO paintings. At his premature death, he was setting expressionistic forms in a wide bands of colors, separated by a white field.

Throughout his relatively short career, he received critical acclaim and financial success.

Sidney Gross is listed in Who Is Who in the East, Who Is Who in America annually 1957 to 1967, Who Is Who in American Art 1948 to 1969, and in Who Was Who in American Art. Essays about his work appear in Master Paintings from the Butler Museum, Catalog of the Whitney Collection, and in Permanent Collection of the Wichita Art Museum, Jewish Artists by Jon Catagno, American Paintings of Today, MOMA, as well as in exhibition catalogs of various museums and his one-man shows, more recently in a monograph for an exhibit in the 1990s, and the 2007 monograph Sidney Gross - A Vision Cut Short, Leonard Davenport and the ongoing biography project on the web at https://web.archive.org/web/20150925133242/http://www.lsdart.com/assets/Artist/grossbook.pdf. Reviews and illustrations appeared in Art News, Art Digest, Arts Magazine, American Art, and most of the then almost a dozen New York area newspapers.

Solo Shows

Contemporary Art Gallery, - NYC 1945-1959 Tirca Karlis Gallery, Provincetown - 1960, 1962 Frank Rehn Gallery, NYC - 1949, 1950, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1956, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1969, memorial 1972 Pinchpenny Gallery - Essex Ct 1959,1985? Seasons Gallery, The Hague, The Netherlands - 1977 David David Gallery, Philadelphia 1991 Kaleidodscope Gallery, Sagamore, MA 1992 Gertrude Stein Gallery - 2000 Davenport & Fleming Gallery - 2007 Memorial exhibits in New York City, Baltimore, and Providence, RI.

Permanent Collections Albright-Knox Art Gallery Allentown Museum of Art - 1967 American Academy of Arts & Letters - Childe Hassam Fund - 2 paintings Art Students League of NY Baltimore Museum of Art - 1961, 1962 Block Museum (Northwestern) - 1996 Brandeis University -1956 Butler Institute of American Art - 1953, 1961, 2004 Walter P. Chrysler Museum - 1960 Colby College - 1958 Columbia University - 1962 Cornell University - 1958 Corcoran Gallery of Art - 1961 Israel Museum of Art - Jerusalem - 1965 Guus Maris Collection James Michner Collection - University of Texas - 1967 Lempert Institute - 20 paintings purchased 1948-52 Lehigh University Art Gallery -1 painting purchased "UFO No. 27" 1968