Date: October 9-November 14
Location: Kaaterskill Fine Arts, Route 23A, Main Street, Hunter, NY
Hours: Monday, Thursday, Friday 10 am - 5 pm, Saturday 10 am – 7 pm, Sunday 11 am – 5 pm.
Information: 518 263 2060
Email: gallery@catskillmtn.org

Purple and yellow flowers swirl in prismatic colors across the canvas. Undulating colors and paisley shapes erupt in an explosion of color. What appears to be a seed head from one perspective may -- from a different angle -- be the curvilinear lines of a finely decorated tribal mask. These iconic images are part of the psychedelic art movement -- curator Jan Schall called it a moment -- that burst onto the art scene in the sixties and seventies.

Through November 14, 2010, the Kaaterskill Gallery will present Imagine: the Alternative Realities of Isaac Abrams. Abrams, a pioneer of '60s mind-expanding art along with Richard Hamilton and John McCracken, may literally be termed the "poster boy" for psychedelic art since it was his 1966 painting, "All Things are One Thing," that became the cover for Psychedelic Art by Robert E. L. Masters and Jean Houston, published in 1967 and still the seminal work on this subject. A self-taught artist, Abrams has an academic background in literature, history, science and psychology. He founded the Coda Gallery, the first gallery of Psychedelic Art in the world in 1965. In 1966, he began working as a self-taught painter. He followed that with work in sculpture the 1970's. In 1981, he added animation artist to his artistic resume. Abrams has exhibited world-wide in such cities as Munich, Frankfurt, Paris, Florence, Vienna, Liverpool, London, Santa Fe and New York.

More recently, Abrams' work was part of the Whitney Museum of American Arts' exhibit, Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, which featured posters, paintings, films, photographs, and other creative memorabilia of an era remembered fondly by many of those who lived through it but sparked a note of cynicism in young art critics who deny the existence of such a thing as "psychedelic fine art" and choose to see in it nothing more than the pretensions of some misguided, stoned-out hippie freaks.

On exhibit in Hunter will be a collection of Abrams' iconic "dot" paintings, in which the dot as a primal form is, as Abrams says, "an expression of the underlying unity of the ever-changing universe beneath the surface of all reality." This is a theme he has used in his art since the '60s and has returned to as a mature artist, especially since visiting the ancient painted caves of southern France a year ago. His paintings are a "mental mosaic of many glimpses of alternative realities" put together to form complex and coherent worlds.

Image: "Birthday," acrylic on canvas by Isaac Abrams