New York State Office of General Services Commissioner RoAnn Destito today announced a special exhibition featuring the work of contemporary New York State artist Phil Frost will be on display 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday at the concourse and plaza level of the Corning Tower from October 31, 2016 to August 18, 2017. Frost will be the first artist to ever hold a major solo exhibition alongside the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, which reaches its 50^th anniversary this year.

The exhibition, Magnetic Shift, will include a selection of Frost’s paintings and three-dimensional pieces, including never previously exhibited works. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held on Wednesday, November 2, from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the concourse-level base of the Corning Tower. Works will also be on view in the Plaza level and on the Concourse - both of which will be accessible to the public during the reception. The reception is free and open to the public.

“When the Empire State Plaza Art Collection was created 50 years ago, it brought to fruition a vision to utilize this public space to expose people to the works of great modern artists, primarily those working in New York State, whose art was reflective of the period when the Plaza was under construction,” said Commissioner Destito. “Under Governor Cuomo’s longstanding priority to make better use of public facilities, we are excited to extend this vision into this century with an exhibit by celebrated contemporary artist Phil Frost whose self-taught artistic style was informed at an early age by the Plaza art collection and its architecture.”

“From a young age I found myself inspired by the various forms of Modernism encapsulated in Wallace Harrison's architectural masterpiece, The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, most notably the works of Clyfford Still, Naum Gabo, Ellsworth Kelly, and David Smith,” said Frost. “It is with great honor that I accept this privilege of being able to now, some 30 years later, form a curated conversation with this work in its unique home.”

Born in Jamestown, Chautauqua County, Frost spent his teenage years in Albany skateboarding in a city that exposed him to the Empire State Plaza and its art collection.

Frost creates work that combines the raw, gritty edge of the street through the use of found materials with an elegant, painterly aesthetic. Frost describes his art as being “comprised of a depth of layered sinuous sheaths of glyphic information that I refer to as intuitive mathematics; they are overlaid and dance atop figurative busts and repetitions or grids of heads that I call perceptive portraiture.” Frost first became known in the early 1990's for his involved installations on the streets of New York City.

He mounted his first solo exhibition at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in 1999 and his first American museum exhibit in 2002 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Frost’s work appears in the public collections of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Princeton University Art Museum, The Progressive Corporation, and Wake Forest University.

He was the winner of the 2004 Pollock-Krasner Award, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

image: Phil Frost, Juelos Penny Welpt Alorm (1996) enamel, spray enamel, ink, graphite, correction fluid, and paper on canvas.