One Night Art Show Highlights Rock and Roll, Punk Cultures of the Seventies and Eighties

NEW YORK - Oct. 28, 2016 - PRLog -- The Van Der Plas Gallery will host a one-night show this Saturday, October 29, 2016 featuring works by iconic artists and musicians that dominated New York's music scene in the '70s and '80s. The "Sound of Color" art show, produced by curator and gallery owner Adriaan Van Der Plas, brings together the biggest icons of the NYC music scene in a revival of this vibrant and exciting time in the City's history.

"This one-night show will be a truly unique experience, unparalleled to anything else in the New York art scene," said Van Der Plas. "We are presenting a carefully curated display of innovative pieces that capture the essence of NYC's musical underworld from the '70s and '80s."

The artists featured in the show defined the art and music scene in New York during this period, and continue to receive rave reviews for their work. The show will include such important figures in the New York music scene as Hubert Kretzschmar, Johnny "JohnnyV" Velardi, Kevin Wendall, Shalom Neuman, J. Lawrence Brandt aka "Bat", Linus Coraggio, Thomas Cox, and Konstantin Bokov.

Hubert Kretzschmar, part of New York's vibrant art and music scene since the late '70s, has worked with such illustrious names as Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Ten Years After, Procol Harum, Kraftwerk, Iggy Pop, and Kiss. His illustrations have been featured on three Rolling Stones LPs, including Some Girls, which was recently re-issued in a deluxe edition, and Tattoo You, photographs from which serve as the basis for a new "Keith Richards Portraits" presented at Scope-Miami last year. At this year's Armory Week in New York City, Kretzschmar presented a stunning portrait of Bjork that received rave reviews.

Kevin Wendall, aka FA-Q', started his art career in New York as well, making him a logical addition to this significant line up. He was a graffiti artist in the '70s and '80s who creatively disfigured billboards and advertisements, scraping out letters to give them new meanings. By the mid-80s his work came into its own. He was awarded the Finland Travel Grant and eventually ended up in a studio in Dusseldorf, West Germany. While in Italy he met and worked with the artist Enrico Baj, one of Italy's best-known contemporary painters. He then joined the Rivington School on the Lower East Side of New York where he and Shalom Neuman worked with metal sculptors, blacksmiths, painters, performance artists and other outsider artists. The school's most significant production was the construction of the Rivington Sculpture Garden in the mid-80s. Totally dissident, FA-Q said, "We were against commercial art, and against capitalism, championing art for people.''

Konstantin Bokov immigrated to New York City in 1974. Bokov shares his whimsical style and endless imagination with New Yorkers in public installations which has earned him a devoted following in neighborhoods around New York City. Unthreatened by societal conventions, Konstantin Bokov says, "I live for my imagination." With found objects he creates layers of multiple dimensions accented by precise lines and bright colors, he says "I am giving you back what you once threw away." In the 1980s, Bokov's work was exhibited at the Now Gallery along with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. The Emerging Collector Gallery has also shown his work. Bokov's art has been part of group shows in London, Paris, Holland, Berlin and Japan, as well as at the Morin Miller Gallery on 57th Street, The Grant Gallery in Soho, and the Monique Goldstrum Gallery in Chelsea. He showed at the 2008 European Outsider Art Fair in Vienna and the 2009 Outsider Art Fair in New York. Since 1993, he has been exclusively represented by the Van Der Plas Gallery.

Shalom Neuman is an art world phenomenon.  By this, he does not conform to predictable art world strategies of "making it."  At first glance, his work may appear excessive, redundant, over the top, metaphysical, even bipolar.  But there is more to it.  To use the proverbial expression, there is more than meets the eye. What is not understood in Shalom's work is how connected it is to the way he thinks—to his philosophical (in contrast to theoretical) way of seeing things in the everyday world—as a kind of symbolic exegesis, a Romantic enticement that goes beyond banalities of the American robber barons into the realm of mysticism, the numerology of the Kabbalah, and the survival of planet Earth.  There is a dark side to Shalom's art that runs contrary to the hypocritical leanings of Puritanism, a dark side that is more comfortable in the Parisian underworld—the Symbolist poets, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud, the painters, Redon and Moreau—than it is to the founders of Plymouth Colony with their theocratic notions of good and evil and their obsessive social paranoia.

Johnny Velardi received his education at Parsons School of Design and later The School of Visual Arts. He lives and works in the East Village, New York City. An artist, curator, and musician for more than 30 years, JohnnyV is well known as the guitarist for the notorious punk band, pUbLiC NuIsAnCe. He has curated and exhibited in art shows including Attack Art (1988 Stockwell Gallery), Metropolis Apocalypse (Supreme Trading 2008), Metal=Heavy and Twisted (Anita Durst Chasama 2009). JohnnyV had his first solo show in 2012 at RMRS  Studios. Other shows he has curated and exhibited there include (S)he is still her(E )Lady Jaye P-Orridge Memorial (RMRS 2014), Springtime Surge 2015 and Demolition Exhibition in 2016. JohnnyV also organized the Beer Olympics, the largest underground pUnk Music Festival on the East Coast for five years in a row.  For more information about JohnnyV, he can be contacted on his personal Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100011772454438) page or on his artist (https://www.facebook.com/JohnnyV-540501029352748/) page.

J. Lawrence Brandt, aka "Bat" studied art at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh before leaving his formal art education to pursue his musical interests. He moved to the Lower East Side of New York City in the early '80s where he became the lead singer and lyricist for pUbLiC NuIsAnCe, a notorious L.E.S. street punk band. After living a very adventurous but traumatic life, he was diagnosed at the age of 48 with Autism Spectrum Disorder. After receiving his diagnosis, he was inspired to return to his artistic passions and begin painting again after a 25-year hiatus. His art combines impressionism and expressionism styles with unique interpretations of perspective, color and space that are enhanced by his autism. He specializes in cityscapes that reflect his real life experiences living and surviving in the squats of New York. His work has been displayed at the Rivington Music Rehearsal Studios in New York City, the Greenpoint Gallery in Brooklyn, and a one-man show at the Proximity Café near Philadelphia, PA where he displayed over 45 paintings.

For the past 20 years, Adriaan Van Der Plas has been seen as a conduit for artists whose work rises from the innermost human creative spirit – a vital and genuine sensibility that's found among the outsider and contemporary artists he represents. The one-night show will take place at the Van Der Plas Gallery (http://www.vanderplasgallery.com/), 156 Orchard Street, New York City, on Saturday, October 29, from 2:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.