NEW YORK.- Gerald Peters Gallery, New York announces an upcoming retrospective of paintings by Ben Schonzeit. Four Decades: An Intimate Look at a Career in Painting will be on view at the Upper East Side gallery from March 22 through April 21, 2007 . The selection of more than 20 paintings provides a rare opportunity to view works from every major phase of the artist’s career. The first in-depth retrospective for Schonzeit, the show includes many paintings on public view for the first time as well as a few canvases created expressly for the exhibition.

Schonzeit was a pioneer of the 1960s SoHo arts scene in New York and is viewed as one of the leaders of the American Photorealist movement of the 1970s. Throughout his 40-year career, Schonzeit has experimented with numerous artistic techniques and mediums, from airbrushing and oil on canvas, to printmaking. Schonzeit often uses superimposed images of flowers, landscapes and portraiture against graphic backgrounds. Despite a variety of subject-matter, Schonzeit’s canvases all achieve a clarity and stillness that might be likened to a reinterpretation of photography. Also included in the exhibition are several of Schonzeit’s “Black Paintings,” largely autobiographical pictures that reference the artist’s feelings of mortality and loss.

Schonzeit was born in Brooklyn in 1942, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union in 1964. His work is in the permanent collections of dozens of museums in the U.S. and abroad including the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York , the Museum of Contemporary Art , Chicago , and the Butler Institute of Art, in Youngstown , Ohio . He has exhibited in 100 group shows and some 25 solo exhibitions internationally, including twice at Documenta, the celebrated exhibition in Kassel , Germany . He currently lives and works in New York City.