Alfred Leslie “Abstraction 1951 - 1962”
Allan Stone Projects
This event has ended.
Allan Stone Projects announces Alfred Leslie: Abstraction 1951 – 1962 on view. The exhibition features paintings and works on paper by one of the seminal artists of the New York art world in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Early in his career, Leslie was an Abstract Expressionist who experimented ambitiously with collage, grid compositions, and gestural and geometric abstraction. The incorporation of chance and control, of hard and soft, of active and passive modes, express the artist’s singular reaction to the explosive aftermath of abstract art in Postwar America.
Following major breakthroughs led by Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, and others, Leslie explored Abstract Expressionist and proto-Pop techniques. His method portrays a balance between vigorous expression and hard-edged control, featuring loaded brush strokes against architectural compositions as in The Black Line, 1960-61. He played with form in the collage Untitled, 1953, where ripped black and white paper are haphazardly stapled together, creating spatial tension. Leslie’s wide-ranging artistic activities, including filmmaking and writing, served as the context for the body of work that came out of this fervent period. Allan Stone stated in his essay on the artist that these works “epitomize the power and dynamic of postwar American abstract painting.” Leslie’s visceral approach to art making is best described as “embodying the zeitgeist of the time.”
Media
Schedule
from October 29, 2015 to December 23, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-10-29 from 18:00 to 20:00