Vera Giviri (b. 1961)

Living and working in Genoa, Italy, Vera Girivi is a self-trained painter and mother of two. She began painting seriously within the past five years. Although mostly detached from the professional art world, she has acknowledged Picasso, Cezanne, Monet, Chagall, Modigliani and Matisse as influences. Girivi paints under a pseudonym: ‘GI’ for Giovanna, her daughter, ‘RI’ for Riccardo, her son, and ‘VI’ for Vittorio, her husband. Under this name, Girivi can be bold in her painting. She gained a tremendous following for her work on Instagram, which grew exponentially when Jerry Saltz highlighted her work.

Since then, James Barron Art has exhibited her work at the Outsider Art Fair in New York and Paris, the ADAA Art Show, the Dallas Art Fair, the Marfa Invitational, and in our gallery in South Kent, Connecticut.We are proud to have placed her work in important private museums and foundations in the United States, Italy, and Germany. Her work continues to touch collectors throughout the world, from Australia to Los Angeles; New York, Vermont, Milan, and beyond.

Janet Sobel (1893 - 1968)

Janet Sobel immigrated from Ukraine to New York in 1908 and began painting in 1937, at age 43, experimenting with mixed materials and drip painting. From 1943 through 1946, Sobel became a powerful presence in the NewYork art world, exhibiting at the Puma Gallery and at Peggy Guggenheim’s “Art of This Century,” where her recurring method of applying ‘drip’ would later be acknowledged as the beginnings of her transcendence from primitivism through Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism.

Sobel was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Ukrainian Museum, New York. Janet Sobel: All-Over, the first major museum retrospective of her work, will open at the Menil on February 23, 2024.

INTERVIEW: ASHLEY SHAPIRO

Janet Sobel

Untitled, c. 1942 - 48
Gouache and pastel on paper
17.875 in x 11.875. in 
$30,000 - $35,000

Winfred Rembert (1945 - 2021)

Winfred Rembert was born in 1945 in rural Americus, Georgia and grew up in nearby Cuthbert. Born out of wedlock, at three months old Rembert’s mother gave him to his great aunt to raise him. Rembert began working in cotton fields and peanut farms in early childhood. He received very little schooling and by age 14 had dropped out to work full-time in the fields. At age 19 in 1965, Rembert attended a peaceful Civil Rights demonstration. The demonstration turned violent, and, fearing for his life, Rembert stole a car to escape two white men with guns. He was arrested and sent to prison without trial. He later escaped and survived a near-lynching after he was caught, an experience that would haunt him and his work. Rembert was then sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison, of which he served five years on a chain gang, followed by two years of construction work for good behavior. While in prison, Rembert learned how to read and write. He also learned to tool leather and began making leather wallets, purses, and belts.

Rembert eventually settled in New Haven with his wife Patsy, who he married after his release from prison in 1974. In 1996, when Rembert was 51, Patsy urged him to record his memories in tooled and dyed leather paintings. Rembert’s powerful compositions chronicle his experience as a Black man during one of the most historically significant eras of the 20th century. Rembert’s paintings are remarkable not only for the stories they tell, but also for their sophisticated compositions. His work stands as a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of artistic expression. In addition to his work as a painter, Rembert wrote his life story in Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South (Bloomsbury, 2021) in collaboration with Erin I. Kelly, for which he was posthumously awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

“Polenghi makes his marks like breathing—not like just anyone breathing without having given though to it, but like someone who understands his breathing as a conscious activity and does it with clarity and naturalness... There is no figure, no ground in these
paintings—just this incessant bustle of matter set in motion by an invisible breath.”

-Barry Schwabsky

Interview with Dara Polenghi