In the early 1970s, after a successful decade as one of the brightest young artists pioneering color field painting, minimalism and pop-abstraction, Edward Avedisian bid adieu to the art world and New York City and moved to sub-bucolic upstate New York. Ensconced in the less-than-genteel shabbiness of small town decay, Avedisian began to paint his new, imperfectly rural scene. Here men work on their pickups until they accumulate sufficient bad repair that they run no more. They sell lumpy pumpkins from the backs of permanently parked flat-bed trucks or spend their days propped against the banisters of second storey back porches and their nights drawing drinks against the cold — or the heat — in edge-of-town bars.

Avedisian sets this scene with rough glory against the same still-glorious backdrop that Frederick Church so preciously painted into the American consciousness. But Avedisian's landscape is nothing if no longer precious. This is today's exurbia: picked over, diversely occupied, and still beautiful. At an intriguing remove, Edward Avedisian's Hudson Valley parallels Marsden Hartley's Maine coast. But where Hartley's landscape was coarse and heroic, Avedisian's is a bold and laconic reverie. His is a very secular pantheism.

If Avedisian's new paintings at first present themselves as a break with his past achievement, they soon reveal themselves to be part and parcel of a singular aesthetic. Clear, complex color, blunt, playful illusion and assertive form still dominate. When asked why he changed styles so radically, Avedisian replies with typical pointedness: "Modernism is a period style."

As an adjunct to his paintings Avedisian has made abstract sculpture over the past twenty-five years. The only time these have been seen in New York was at The Grey Art Gallery in 1979 in an exhibition with the painter Richard Hennessy. Also included in the current show are a couple of Avedisian's earlier abstract paintings.

Edward Avedisian was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He showed in New York at Ivan Karp's and Dick Bellamy's Hansa Gallery and at the Robert Elkon Gallery. In LA he showed with Nicholas Wilder. Avedisian's work has been included in several Whitney Annuals, in the Museum of Modern Art's Responsive Eye exhibition and many other museum shows. The artist's work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney and the Guggenheim Museums.