Edvins Strautmanis Exhibition

Allan Stone Projects

poster for Edvins Strautmanis Exhibition

This event has ended.

Allan Stone Projects presents Edvins Strautmanis. Selected from the Allan Stone Collection, the exhibition presents five monumental paintings from the early 1970s, when the artist’s work was in a state of euphoric flux. Though he took up the legacy of Abstract Expressionism with vigor, Strautmanis pushed his large-scale canvases toward the brink of material overload and established his own performative brand of painting. For Strautmanis, paintings were not just visual objects but objects that became charged in real time by accumulated dramatic gesture, a conception that tied him not only to Pollock and Kline, but also to artists such as Kazuo Shiraga and the Gutai Group. Ultimately, Strautmanis extended both traditions, balancing painting’s dual identities as object and act with authority and grace. Concurrent with the exhibition, we will feature works by some of Strautmanis’ stylistic antecedents, including Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning John Chamberlain, Alfred Leslie and Charles Ginnever.

Tensions between chaos and order, the pictorial and the material, provided Strautmanis with his method and gave his works their drama. While the artist was a painter of obvious compositional nuance, he was also relentless about challenging the physical limits of his control, compelled to paint on the floor rather than upright. The scale of the marks seem to demand the force of the artist’s entire body. The vast quantities of poured paint, like lava flows and maelstroms of pigment, seem to streak and blanket the surface of the painting independent of the artist’s hand. Even Strautmanis’ inventive choice of painting implement—paint-laden brooms deployed fetishistically to drag, slap and stir marks against the canvas with “wet-on-wet” immediacy—reflect the epic imperative of these works.

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Schedule

from January 08, 2015 to March 21, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-01-08 from 18:00 to 20:00

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