NYAB Event - Jack Beal “Hard Edge Paintings, 1968-1972”

Jack Beal “Hard Edge Paintings, 1968-1972”

George Adams Gallery

This event has ended.

In January and February the George Adams Gallery will show a selection of paintings byJack Beal dating from 1968 to 1972, a four year stretch of time that was a fertile and searching period for the artist. During these years Beal relentlessly pursued an investigation of geometry and form, and this effort resulted in a group of hard edge paintings of still-lives and furniture, some including the figure. While these paintings are vividly colored, large-scale, and imbued with other familiar Pop sensibilities, they somehow suggest an earnestness of purpose and are without any trace of irony.

Although this was a new approach for Beal, the concept and execution of these works can be directly traced back to the artist’s education in Chicago at the Art Institute. His teacher and mentor, Isobel MacKinnon, taught painting with an emphasis on spatial structuralism and used a system of leading the eye into the painting with diagonal lines. According to Using the lessons of Isobel MacKinnon, I began diagonals as lines of entry and exit, as well as using the empty chairs and other foreground objects as “welcome mats” and linear fractures and convolutions as a means of drawing the viewers into the image and pressing the subjects out into The contemporary reception of these works reflected the mindset of viewers and critics at the time, and many considered the paintings too mechanical and graphic. As the artist and critic Sidney Tillim wrote in 1969 “[Beal] combines two and three dimensional design in the same pictures and constructs set-ups that are obviously “machines” which provide the endless flow of varied shape, pattern and color.”