David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Awakening, the gallery’s second solo exhibition for New York artist, Lester Rapaport. The presentation includes 14 paintings: eight square canvases from a new series, Into The Mystery, completed in 2020 and six from an earlier series of shaped canvases, Gifts to the Universe, painted in 1988 and 1989. The later paintings represent an early breakthrough for the artist as they followed several cathartic series, Convergence (1980-81) and Emergence (1982-3) as well as extensive reading in astrophysics, psychology and higher states of consciousness. Those paintings manifested a culmination of understanding himself as a human being and his location in the cosmos, but also opened the door to a decades-long meditation practice and systemic approach to realizing serenity in his paintings through minimal compositions and ethereal sprayed color. Thus, the newest series contains single central discs on square canvas with ethereal grounds, and according to the artist, presents “the disc as a primal mystery with emotive color relationships between disc, background, and horizontal mist-like bands.” The reductive compositions are every bit as bold as the shaped canvases in Gifts to the Universe, but relying primarily on the dynamic color interactions between the discs and grounds to convey “a hereness and nowness and a centering and opening out of awareness” per the teachings of John Vervaeke (think Baba Ram Dass and Be Here Now, 1971). The new series also represents a recent breakthrough and like the earlier series, also borne out of spirituality and a raised consciousness.   

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