NYAB Event - Peter Young “Linear Weave (Vertical Fold) Paintings: 1980

Peter Young “Linear Weave (Vertical Fold) Paintings: 1980 - 1983”

Algus Greenspon

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Algus Greenspon presents an exhibition of Linear Weave (Vertical Fold), a series of paintings by Peter Young made in 1980–1983.

Peter Young’s Linear Weave (Vertical Fold) paintings are among the most intricate, rigorously chromatic and precisely executed works the artist has produced. Shown downtown at Dick Bellamy’s Oil and Steel Gallery in 1984, this body of work builds on Young’s woven grids of the mid-1960’s, while incorporating the brilliant color and mirror symmetry of his Rorschach-like vertical fold paintings of the early 1970s. The result is subtle and complex, with a perspective unlike that found in any work from the time. In these paintings the artist managed to extend minimalism’s endgame reductivism through lyrical abstraction’s often arbitrary atmospherics, arriving at something new and fully realized. Fittingly, these paintings were the artist’s last exhibition of new work in New York prior to last year’s show of his White Ellipse paintings from the 1990s.

Peter Young was born in 1940 in Pittsburgh, PA and grew up in southern California. He came to New York in 1960 to study art history at NYU and began painting soon after. Observing that abstract expressionism was over and that Minimalism was already on its way to becoming academic, Young set out on his own informally rigorous path. He showed in the 1960s and 1970s with Nicholas Wilder in LA, Rolf Ricke in Germany and Leo Castelli (a two-man show with David Diao), then Noah Goldowsky and Dick Bellamy in New York. Just as his painting was attracting increasing attention, Young left New York to spend time in Costa Rica (where he was when the Castelli show opened), Spain and the American Southwest. Young finally settled in Bisbee, AZ where he continues to live and work. His paintings are in many private and museum collections, including those of the Guggenheim, Modern, Whitney and Albright-Knox Museums.

[Image: Peter Young “#17-1980” 1980, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 39 in.]