3 November – 22 December 2017
Pace is delighted to present IMPULSE, an exhibition of radical abstract painting from the United States in the 1960s and '70s. Focusing on lyrical, post-painterly abstraction, the exhibition features work by Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Sam Gillam, Ed Clark and Frank Bowling. Responding to the dominance of Abstract Expressionism in the '50s, these artists boldly experimented with process, form and colour. Each found new ways to apply paint to canvas, championed improvisational techniques, and used colour expressively.
The 60s and 70s were a radical time in the
history of abstract painting in America.Emerging from the dominance of
Abstract Expressionism in the 50s, Frank Bowling, Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam,
Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland each experimented with new techniques
to push the language of abstract painting forward. While Noland
eliminated highly personal, gestural expression in favour of hard-edged
abstraction, others poured, dripped, and pushed paint across the surface
of the canvases.
Many had the desire to break down the distinction between painting and sculpture, to create paintings that were physical objects as well as abstractions. Ed Clark and Kenneth Noland, for example, shaped their canvases, using their unconventional forms as vehicles for colour, while Sam Gilliam beveled the edges of his canvases and eventually took them off the stretcher all together.
Pre-eminent art critic Clement Greenberg initially influenced these artists – Bowling, who talked to Greenberg almost daily, recalls that “Clem spoke for us all.” Despite Greenberg’s importance, many of the artists later experimented beyond the ideals and conventions disseminated in his writings. As part of the same cultural network in New York and Washington D.C., yet working individually, the artists on view exchanged ideas and often exhibited together. In 1971, Noland, Clark and Gilliams showed together in the seminal de luxe show, which explored the potency of colour in post-painterly abstraction and was one of the first racially-integrated exhibitions in America.
Many had the desire to break down the distinction between painting and sculpture, to create paintings that were physical objects as well as abstractions. Ed Clark and Kenneth Noland, for example, shaped their canvases, using their unconventional forms as vehicles for colour, while Sam Gilliam beveled the edges of his canvases and eventually took them off the stretcher all together.
Pre-eminent art critic Clement Greenberg initially influenced these artists – Bowling, who talked to Greenberg almost daily, recalls that “Clem spoke for us all.” Despite Greenberg’s importance, many of the artists later experimented beyond the ideals and conventions disseminated in his writings. As part of the same cultural network in New York and Washington D.C., yet working individually, the artists on view exchanged ideas and often exhibited together. In 1971, Noland, Clark and Gilliams showed together in the seminal de luxe show, which explored the potency of colour in post-painterly abstraction and was one of the first racially-integrated exhibitions in America.
As part of the Washington Color School in
Washington D.C., Louis, Noland and later Gilliam emphasised the primacy
of colour and frequently used acrylic paints on unprimed canvas.
Highlights of the exhibition include Noland’s Indo (1977), a
shaped canvas that reveals the emotional effects and expressive
potential of colour and form. As explained by Adam Pendleton, “The
precision that abstraction requires is often not understood. Noland
renders targets, stripes, chevrons as potential, as abstraction.
Articulating the seemingly unintelligible through form.”
Louis stained his raw canvases by pouring and folding, often leaving
large expanses untouched, as demonstrated by the veil painting Plentitude
(1958). In this work, Louis manipulated the angle of the stretcher and
varied the tautness of the canvas to direct the poured paint and achieve
a tapered effect. Gilliam similarly experimented with the application of his acrylic paint; in May III (1972), he crumpled and folded the canvas while staining it with paint in order to produce innovative effects. As in Louis’ work, in this brushless abstraction, the colours bleed together rhythmically. In After Micro W #2,
Gilliam continues his dappled, soak-stained technique and removes the
canvas from the stretcher, choosing instead to drape the fabric directly
from the wall and break down the boundary between painting and
sculpture.
In New York, Bowling and Clark eschewed the
use of paint brushes in their search for pure, formal abstraction. In
the early 70s, Bowling created a mechanism to pour paint directly onto
canvas, mixing and manipulating colours and textures to create Poured
Paintings such as Curtain (1974) and Lenoraseas (1976).
An early proponent of shaped canvases in the 50s, Ed Clark began using a
large push-broom to push paint across the surface of the canvas in the
60s, creating subtly blended and thickly textured stripes of paint such as those in Yucatan Beige (1976), in which the stripes traverse beyond the central ellipse. For Clark, “the
floors in New York or Paris are his easels… Gallons, quarts and pints
of paint are scattered around [the edges of] his canvas. Each has colors
of prime importance.” (Ted Joans, ‘Clark and I,’ Edward Clark: For the sake of the Search, (Belleville Lake, Michigan: Belleville Lake Press, 1997), p.33 )
The works in IMPULSE have rarely been exhibited in the United Kingdom. Despite their renown in the 70s, most of the artists in IMPULSE were
largely overlooked in art history for many years. More recently, their
works are being reevaluated in major exhibitions such as Soul of a Nation
at Tate Modern, Bowling’s recent survey exhibition curated by Okwui
Enwezor at the Haus Der Kunst and Gilliam’s upcoming solo-exhibition at
the Kunstmuseum Basel. IMPULSE brings these artists’ works
together with those of their traditionally better-known peers – Noland
and Louis – to reveal how the artists exchanged ideas and developed new
methods and techniques in parallel with each other.
Jazz was often a source of inspiration for
some of these artists, and a metaphor for how they worked. Between 1960
and the late 1970s, experimental labels such as Columbia and El Saturn
released jazz by musicians including John Coltrane, Gil Evans,
Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Colman and Sun Ra. These musicians
took the principles of free jazz to extremes with their embrace of
improvised melodies and techniques. Their approaches are echoed in the
precociously experimental practices of some of the artists in the
exhibition. Noland described jazz musicians as “fellow modernists” and
linked painting in this period to music: “what was new was the idea that
something you painted could be like something you heard.” (quoted in
Karen Wilkin, Kenneth Noland (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), p. 8)
IMPULSE will be
accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an introduction by curators
Pernilla Holmes and Amelie von Wedel from Wedel Art and an essay by
Adrienne Edwards, Curator at Large of The Walker Art Center.
Contributions by artists including, Adam Pendleton, Kasper Sonne, Zach
Harris, Samuel Levi Jones and Matthew Collings, reveal how these works
are relevant to a younger generation of artists today.
Frank BowlingFrank Bowling (b. 1934, Bartica, Guyana) emigrated to London at age 19. After three years in the Royal Air Force, he began his artistic studies and was awarded a scholarship to attend London’s Royal College of Art in 1959. After visiting the United States for the first time with David Hockney in 1961, a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled Bowling to establish a studio in New York in 1967, where he would remain until 1975. In the late 1960s, he transitioned from Pop-inflected figurative expressionism with the development of his Map Paintings, which feature abstract fields of colour overlaid with the stencilled outlines of continents. By the early 1970s, he shifted to purely abstract painting, pouring acrylic paint over tilted canvases and creating textured reliefs with acrylic gel and polystyrene foam. Bowling has had one-artist exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1971); The Serpentine Gallery, London (1986); City Gallery, Leicester (1996); Dallas Museum of Art (2015); and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017), among others. Bowling was elected to the Royal Academy in 2005.
Ed Clark
Ed Clark (b. 1926, New Orleans) is a
pioneering Abstract Expressionist known for his bold colours and
expansive gestures. He relocated with his family in 1933 from Louisiana
to Chicago. After completing military service during World War II, Clark
attended the Art Institute of Chicago before going to Paris in 1952,
where he studied at L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Working
abstractly and on an increasing scale in Paris, Clark began using a push
broom as a brush to create large-scale gestures. Moving to New York in
1956, he continued to develop his work and exhibit at downtown
artist-run galleries, including the Brata Gallery. Clark was among the
first artists to produce nonrepresentational shaped paintings in 1956 by
extending his working surfaces beyond a rectangular canvas, and
developed oval paintings in 1968. He has travelled frequently, working
in New York, Paris, Crete, Nigeria, Brazil, and Martinique. With
one-artist shows throughout the United States and Europe, Clark received
retrospectives at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1980), and at
the Pensacola Museum of Art, Florida (2007).
Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam (b. 1932, Tupelo, Mississippi),
an artist associated with the Washington Color School, is renowned for
his suspended and draped paintings. In 1942, Gilliam’s family moved to
Louisville, Kentucky, where he would earn both bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in art from the University of Louisville. Moving to Washington,
D.C., in 1962, the artist loosened his painterly approach over the
course of the decade as he began creating works with thinned acrylic
paint. By the late 1960s, Gilliam was soaking canvases in paint and
folding them in order to spread the pigment and leave physical imprints
of his process. He began to make paintings without stretchers in 1968,
suspending and draping colour-stained canvases from walls, ceilings, and
sawhorses. The folded, wrapped, and knotted forms of these works bring
to attention the sculptural characteristics of their materials, while
maintaining their status as paintings. Monographic exhibitions of his
work have been presented by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
(1967), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971), Rutgers University
Art Gallery, New Brunswick, New Jersey (1976), and the Seattle Art
Museum, Washington (2017), among others. A retrospective of Gilliam’s
paintings was organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2005.
Morris Louis
Morris Louis (b. 1912, Baltimore, Maryland;
d. 1962, Washington, D.C.) is one of the leading figures of Colour-Field
painting and a founding member of the Washington Color School. Having
studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts, Louis moved
to Washington, D.C. in 1952. He is best known for his continual
experimentation with colour and medium, manipulating large, unprimed
canvases to control the flow of poured acrylic paints. In his 1960 essay
“Louis and Noland”, the critic Clement Greenberg described Louis’s
unprecedented contribution to painting was for an artist “to feel,
think, and conceive almost exclusively in terms of open color.” In the
early 1950s, he and Noland collaborated on a series of works they
referred to as, using a jazz analogy, the ‘jam paintings’. Following his
early death, a memorial exhibition of his work was held at the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1963. Louis’s paintings are held in
by public collections internationally, including at the Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art,
Humlebæk, Denmark; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery
of Australia, Canberra; and Tate Gallery, London.
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland (b. 1924, Asheville, North
Carolina; d. 2010, Port Clyde, Maine) attended Black Mountain College in
the late forties after serving in the Air Force during World War II.
While studying there with Josef Albers, he developed an early interest
in the emotional effects of colour and geometric forms. He is one of the
best-known American Colour-Field painters, and helped establish the
Washington Color School in the 1950s with Morris Louis. A
commitment to line and colour can be traced throughout his oeuvre
beginning with his Circle paintings and extending through a visual
language that includes chevrons, diamonds, horizontal bands, plaid
patterns, and shaped canvases. In 1977, a major travelling
retrospective of the artist’s work was presented by the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum in New York. The first major monograph analyzing his
career was written by Kenworth Moffett and published by Abrams in 1977.
Memorial retrospectives of his work were presented in 2010 by the Museum
of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Wedel Art is an art advisory firm with
special expertise in Modern and Contemporary Art founded by Amelie von
Wedel. Wedel Art works with private, institutional and corporate clients
on their collections, exhibition programmes, special projects and philanthropy, as well as curating exhibitions and artist projects internationally.
Amelie von Wedel has organised numerous exhibitions with artists such as Sam Gilliam, Frank Bowling and Laurie Simmons, along with many survey exhibitions, books on art, and commissioning major performance art and public art projects. She is also Group Executive Director of Intelligence Squared, and regularly gives talks on art at institutions internationally.
As a Director at Wedel Art, Pernilla Holmes’ curatorial projects have included exhibitions with artists such as Theaster Gates and Samuel Levi Jones, themed group shows from post-war to present, and performance works with artists including Nastio Mosquito, on behalf of the EMDASH foundation, and Ryan McNamara. Holmes has written extensively about contemporary art, as well as giving talks at museums and institutions.
Visit Wedel Art online at www.wedelart.com.
Amelie von Wedel has organised numerous exhibitions with artists such as Sam Gilliam, Frank Bowling and Laurie Simmons, along with many survey exhibitions, books on art, and commissioning major performance art and public art projects. She is also Group Executive Director of Intelligence Squared, and regularly gives talks on art at institutions internationally.
As a Director at Wedel Art, Pernilla Holmes’ curatorial projects have included exhibitions with artists such as Theaster Gates and Samuel Levi Jones, themed group shows from post-war to present, and performance works with artists including Nastio Mosquito, on behalf of the EMDASH foundation, and Ryan McNamara. Holmes has written extensively about contemporary art, as well as giving talks at museums and institutions.
Visit Wedel Art online at www.wedelart.com.
