Marquee Projects is thrilled to begin our eighth season with Deuce, a two-person exhibition featuring paintings by James Greco and sculptures by Joel Perlman.

The two artists first met in the classroom thirty-five years ago – one as a student and the other as a teacher – and established a friendship later in life, subsequently working together for many years and now exhibiting together for the first time.

James Greco is a New York-based artist with a multidisciplinary approach to his art practice, encompassing painting, sculpture, installation, performance, site-specific time-based work, collage, and drawing. His work is designed to be viewed not only as singular objects but as an orchestration of multiple elements expressing a poetic, personal narrative. His use of gesture, image, and the exploration of materials has developed into a body of work influenced by his own experiences of life, death, love, beauty, decay, violence, and destruction.

Joel Perlman is best known for sculptures of welded steel, aluminum, and bronze which extrapolate flat geometries into three-dimensional space. While creating a multi-decade body of work in a distinctly personal style, Perlman obliquely references the welded sculptures of Picasso and Julio Gonzalez, as well as experiments in abstraction including Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Russian Constructivism. While studying art at Cornell, his professor said, “If you want to learn how to weld, go to a trade school.” So, Perlman did, learning the skill alongside farmers, bikers, and truck drivers, developing his lifelong interest in machinery and anything that moves fast: motors, gears, cars, motorcycles.

James Greco received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions including Elga Wimmer Gallery, New York, NY; Mark Borghi Fine Art, New York, NY; Murial Guepin Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Bert Green Fine Arts, Chicago, IL; Latela Curatorial, Washington D.C.; Ille Arts, Amagansett, NY; Private Public Gallery, Hudson, NY, and Marquee Projects, Bellport, NY. James has participated in the residency program at Cill Rialaig Arts Center in Ireland and was a recipient of the Penny McCall Foundation Grant. His work is collected across Europe and the United States.

Joel Perlman was born in New York City. He maintains studios in Tribeca and Watermill, New York. He began welding at Cornell University (BFA 1965) and then at the Central School of Art and Design, London, and the University of California, Berkeley (MA 1967). In the 1970s-90s he had numerous exhibitions at the seminal Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York. Perlman is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. His work is included in important public and private collections including the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY, Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY, Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, The Los Angeles County Museum, California, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.