George Negroponte: Everything I Know — George Negroponte

Anita Rogers Gallery presents Everything I Know, a solo exhibition of new work by George Negroponte. The exhibition will be on view November 5 - December 19, 2026, at 494 Greenwich Street, Ground Floor, in New York City. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Thursday, November 5, 6–8pm. George Negroponte, October 2026.

Anita Rogers Gallery: How would you describe your work to someone who isn’t familiar with it? Can you put your vision into words?

George Negroponte: Ouch. That’s not easy. It’s like explaining baseball to a Greek—or Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” A dizzying task. A relationship with a painting matures over time. Then, only then, you start to know.

The Iliad and the Odyssey cover twenty years. An entire generation. Then you return home and pass through the gate into unknowing.

ARG: It has been seven years since your last major solo exhibition. How has your work evolved during that time, and how have you changed as an artist?

GN: Again, not easy. Turned 70. Organized 25 shows. Wrote 25 essays in two years. Drugs again after 40 years. Crashed. Repented at the local Greek Orthodox Church. Father Alexander Karloutsos bailed out my soul. Joined AA. Left AA. Then NPH—Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus. Brain surgery. Rehab. Worked in bed. Learned to walk again. Sobriety. Back to work. The gym. Started painting outside. Got happier. The paintings changed with me. My own Odyssey. Making art should come with a sign: DANGER AHEAD.

ARG: You have spoken about Cézanne and other painters who have been particularly important to you. Has your understanding of their work, or your relationship to it, changed over time? GN: I’ll answer backwards.

I’ve painted for 50 years. Everything I know tells me painting is nothing more or less than love. Truth exists at the outer limits. At the edge.

Very few people know much of anything I write about. I’m in the “inner sanctum.” Like the Grand Rebbe. No one knows exactly what he means, but it sounds serious.

But while the inner sanctum goes deep, I observe and paint from the outside. I’m not explaining anything. I’m devoted to Hans Hofmann’s The Search for the Real. It’s great. I don’t understand a single thing he says. But I agree with him: painting is not about the real. It is the real. It’s a thing in itself, liberated from the outside world.

I want to address young artists who need to own their pictorial language. In college I was trying to make a painting. Any painting. I was completely lost.

At Yale, the Bauhaus was the core religion. Josef Albers was still a great presence. Walker Evans too. You could spot them strolling around the A&A building, commiserating about their chosen disciples.

I was educated inside this extraordinary Modernist machine without understanding much. Then Bill Bailey explained it to me: Cézanne dies in 1906, and abstraction is born. Picasso dies in 1973, and Post-Modernist art is born. And of all places, at Yale. Bernard Chaet mourned Picasso’s death as “the end of painting.” It sounded dreadful.

Everything I knew then was Ad Reinhardt. Mark Rothko. Frank Stella. Ellsworth Kelly. Somewhere along the way my feelings about Stella stalled. Brice Marden and David Novros introduced me to the past. Suddenly it rose like a soufflé. Rothko, Kline, de Kooning, Reinhardt, and Kelly carried the past with them. That mattered. I made my own paints. Real gesso. Beeswax and oil paint. Finally, egg tempera.

It stank. But I wanted the old knowledge. How a surface was made. How paint held together. How a painting could carry its past without becoming the past. Now I paint with house paints. Fifty years later; still here, still painting. I just don’t need to know where it’s going, because: “ The mark, the pour, the shape, the surface, the atmosphere, and the lump of paint can be seen entirely on its own terms, speaking to me from beyond all reason, like things in themselves. ”  (2015) George Negroponte