White Dice presents Al Held: About House, an exhibition surveying the trailblazing apply of American painter Al Held (1928–2005). Bringing collectively masterworks from throughout his five-decade profession, the choice reveals the extent to which Held realised novel modes of kind, house and color, navigating spatial complexity by a mix of hard-edged geometry and spontaneous gestural expression. Describing his work in a 1977 interview as ‘an area that’s in fixed flux, that’s by no means at relaxation, that’s relational’, Held engaged in a steady technique of trial and reinvention, experimenting with scale, kind, floor and color to discover the potential of spatial abstraction.
Within the late Forties, Held availed himself of the GI Invoice to pursue his inventive research, first enrolling on the Artwork College students League in New York then venturing to Paris to check on the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He returned to New York in 1953 to a metropolis within the thrall of Summary Expressionism, encountering first-hand the affect effected by artists akin to Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. Though carefully related to the motion, and sometimes thought-about a number one determine of its second technology, Held notably eschewed artwork critic Clement Greenberg’s insistence on ‘flatness’ as a criterion of modernist portray. As a substitute, Held solid a singular path, endeavouring to concretise quantity and house.
In a 1987 dialogue with American artwork critic Irving Sandler, the artist recalled resonating with the ‘Cézanne axiom of making an attempt to provide Impressionism construction.’ Motivated by a want to introduce construction to the nebulous kinds attribute of Summary Expressionism, he developed his sequence of ‘Taxi Cab’ work (1959–60). Following his paint-laden ‘Pigment’ works, the ‘Taxi Cabs’ marked a pivotal second within the artist’s apply, the shift from oil paint to the faster-drying polymer-based acrylic affording Held the liberty to repaint his canvases a number of occasions over. Within the expansive 23-foot-wide Taxi Cab IV (1959), displayed in South Gallery I, rudimentary geometric configurations emerge by Held’s broad-brushed dealing with of his medium. Rendered in daring, main colors, the buoyant and off-kilter shapes evoke the pandemonic throng of site visitors in his native metropolis, as implied by the title.
The artist’s ‘urge for specificity’ quickly advanced into the ‘Alphabet Work’ (1961–67), a sequence of mural-sized works through which Held remoted letters of the Roman alphabet, delineating them with serrated edges of color. In work akin to I Beam (1961), Held harnesses the typographic and pictorial high quality of the letters to probe and concretise kind, wanting past their signifying operate with a purpose to eradicate a studying of the work. Expansive in scale, the armatures of the letters lengthen past the edge of the image airplane, amplifying their standing as objects that possess a bodily presence.
By 1967, Held was able to discover new realms of dimensionality. Drawing on his prior endeavours to transcend the planar floor of the canvas by built-up oil paint, he sought to mixture extra info inside pictorial house, marking the beginning of a decade-long sequence generally known as the ‘Black and White’ work. Eschewing color, works akin to Esopus I (1969) and Black Nile VII (1974) are structured across the cubic volumes of elemental shapes. Delineating the geometries of squares, circles and triangles with daring, interpenetrating strains that reach past the image-field, Held displaces the parameters of cubic dimension to introduce unmoored and paradoxical views.
Sensing that he had interrogated the chances of the ‘Black and White’ style to its fullest extent, Held reintroduced color to his apply in the summertime of 1978. Pastel and neon hues suffuse these new work to assist distinguish planes and views in his more and more advanced and expansive compositions. Displayed within the North Galleries, 5 seminal works from Held’s ‘Return to Color’ sequence (1978–84) manifest matrixed configurations of ‘gravity-less’ geometric kinds and interlocking trellised beams. Inside groundless fields of color, Held right here introduces a deepened sense of house by the interaction of sunshine and shadow and compositions with architectural dimension – all of which laid the inspiration for the artist’s subsequent and maybe most formidable sequence.
Throughout the closing twenty years of his life, Held pioneered new realms of digital house. Coinciding with the formative technological developments rising within the Nineteen Eighties, Held’s ‘Luminous Constructs’ (1985–2005) and watercolour work – three of which discover their place alongside the Bermondsey gallery hall – humanise the nascent technological prospects of the time, shaping a way of dimension that we now recognise because the digital sphere. In these works, house unfolds as an infinite expanse, inside which elementary geometric ideas are elaborated into illusory spatial configurations that anticipate extra superior visualisation applied sciences and computer-generated cyberspaces. Dimpled or pixelated cubes and spheres work together with extra advanced kinds akin to ribbons, floating chequerboards and tunnelling wormholes.
Suffused with illusory mild sources, the gradations of sunshine and shadow inside these works reveal a rigidity between subjective and goal remark, inspiring an phantasm of deep house and disoriented perspective. In accordance with Held, the relative areas depicted in these works reveal ‘a number of truths’, embracing contradiction and paradox as inherent issues in representing quantity in portray. Difficult Euclidean ideas of geometry, the ‘Luminous Constructs’ emerge as multiversal successors to Piranesi’s semi-illusionistic landscapes. Drawing additionally from Renaissance artwork of their use of narrative and perspective, Held expanded the sphere of the viewer by the compression of volumetric house. On the precipice of Twenty first-century technological progress, working in parallel to early ideas of digital actuality which have now develop into ubiquitous, Held’s late works optimistically gesture in the direction of the longer term.
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