Displaying items by tag: black paintings

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots is a sensational exhibition – grand, exhilarating and so unexpected as to make the painter’s career look altogether different. It brings together nearly half of the semi-figurative Black Paintings from the early 1950s. This would be unique enough – they haven’t been shown together since Pollock’s death, drunk at the wheel of his Oldsmobile in 1956 – but here they appear among a tremendous selection of paintings from every period, to reveal a startling continuity between the figurative and the abstract in Pollock’s career.

The veteran American artist Alex Katz was inspecting the hang of his new paintings while I looked at them, but I could not ask him any questions. I was dumbstruck. The only thing I could have said to him at that moment would have been a stuttered, “How come you paint so well?”

How can simple pictures of faces be so unexpected, exciting and fascinating? Katz has been painting portraits for a long time now – he’s 87 and began his career in the age of Jackson Pollock – and his latest works do not shatter his established style. Their main novelty is that all the figures are set against black. Many of the pictures have a wide CinemaScope format so the people in them stand out as colourful shapes against a nightscape of glossy darkness.

Works by American artist Frank Stella are currently being featured in three exhibitions organized by leading galleries. Dominique Lévy is inaugurating her London outpost with the show “Local History: Castellani, Judd, Stella,” which is complemented by a partner exhibition of the same title at her Manhattan gallery. Meanwhile, Marianne Boesky Gallery is hosting a show of Stella’s sculptures in New York. Stella is co-represented by Lévy and Boesky.

Stella, who has been a dominant figure in abstract painting since the early 1960s, is best known for his Minimalist works and post-painterly abstractions. He gained immediate recognition in 1959, thanks to his “Black Paintings” -- a series of precisely-striped canvases that were created according to a predetermined, circumscribed system conceived by the artist.