Melvin Edwards “Painted Scupture”

Melvin Edwards “Painted Scupture”

Alexander Gray Associates

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Alexander Gray Associates presents its fifth exhibition of work by Melvin Edwards (b.1937), Painted Sculpture. An influential figure in African American art, Edwards’ practice reflects his engagement with the history of race, labor, and violence, as well as with themes of the African Diaspora. The Gallery’s exhibition features historical painted sculpture and works on paper—many of which have not been exhibited for decades. Extending Edwards’ extraordinary range as a sculptor, the presentation highlights the artist’s commitment to formal innovation.

Edwards created his first painted sculptures in 1968 during a summer residency in Minneapolis, MN. After he left the city, under the aegis of the celebrated museum director Martin Friedman, these chromatic works comprised one of the Walker Art Center’s first solo outdoor sculpture exhibitions. Later that same year, Edwards joined the Smokehouse Associates in New York, which was founded by fellow artist and friend William T. Williams. Together with other members of the collective, he painted vivid, abstract murals in Harlem, transforming vacant sites in an effort to revitalize the neighborhood.

Adapting the color and geometry of these projects, Edwards’ primarily monochromatic painted sculptures harness the potential of paint to establish relationships between disparate elements while introducing the unexpected. These large-scale works are in multiple museum collections, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, as well as on display outside Bethune Tower in Harlem, NY.

Edwards’ approach to color is instinctual. “It is so hard to explain the meaning of the color/form relationship,” he explains. “Once my intuitive sense is in gear I tend to see the possibilities of some color relationships and their implications.” Meanwhile, his works’ forms expand on the modernist vocabulary of Alexander Calder’s stabiles while inviting comparisons to Julio González, David Smith, and Mark di Suvero’s steel constructions.

Characterized by an inherent dynamism, Edwards’ painted sculptures are calligraphic—their linear quality recalling the artist’s interest in capitalizing on the potential of sculpture to function as, in his words, “drawing in space.” Works like Felton (1974), whose title honors the artist’s grandfather, James Felton, and Augusta (1974), a tribute to the artist’s grandmother, reflect this interest in the graphic. Juxtaposing static structures with curved and swooping shapes, Edwards characterizes these pieces as giving the impression of “motion captured and frozen.”

At the same time, by combining autobiography with formalist concerns, Felton, Augusta, and other painted sculptures imbue abstraction with complex histories and sociopolitical issues—recalling the artist’s 1971 assertion that Black artists “must make works that use our lives and feelings as their basis for existence.” At once resolutely abstract yet deeply personal, these lyrical, chromatic structures reveal Edwards’ belief in the power of abstraction to alter spaces and transform viewers.

Melvin Edwards’ work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally. In 1993, the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY organized Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective 1963–1993. In 2015, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, TX presented a second retrospective, Melvin Edwards: Five Decades. This exhibition traveled to the Zimmerli Museum of Art, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ and to the Columbus Museum of Art, OH. Other recent solo exhibitions include Melvin Edwards: Festivals, Funerals, and New Life, Brown University, Providence, RI (2017); Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Brazil (2018); and Melvin Edwards: Crossroads, Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019), travels to Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA (2020) and University of Southern California (USC) Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2020). Edwards’ work has also been featured in innumerable group exhibitions, including Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2017), traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK (2018), Brooklyn Museum, NY (2018), The Broad, Los Angeles, CA (2019), de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA (2019), and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2020); Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945–1965, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2016); All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale, Italy (2015); Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2014); Blues for Smoke, The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2012), traveled to Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2013); Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2012); and African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2011), traveled to Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2012). Edwards’ work is represented in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Edwards taught at Rutgers University from 1972 to 2002. In 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA.

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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