Jay Rosenblum

"Untitled, " Jay Rosenblum, Hard-Edge Color Field, Colorful Horizontal Stripes

1973

Oli T. Sihvonen (1921 - 1991) The Secrets in the Circle, 1962 Oil on canvas 25 x 34 in Signed lower right; signed, titled dated, and inscribed "Box 563 Taos, N.M." on the reverse Provenance: Private Collection, Nyack, New York Known for large, hard-edged abstractions, Oli T. Sihvonen, a Brooklyn native of Finnish ancestry, grew up in Connecticut. He attended the Norwich Art School before enrolling at the Art Students League in New York between 1938 and 1941. During World War II, Sihvonen served in the United States Army as a sergeant, specializing, as he later said, in “camouflage and deception.” His tour of duty took him to Europe where he encountered the work of Paul Cézanne. In the summer of 1946, Sihvonen traveled to western North Carolina to study at Black Mountain College, which experienced a boost in enrollment following the war years. He was greatly influenced by the progressive color theories of Josef Albers, and, later, the thinking of Buckminster Fuller. After leaving Black Mountain in 1948, Sihvonen continued his studies under the G.I. Bill at Louis Ribak’s Taos Valley Art School in New Mexico from 1949 to 1950. A year spent painting murals in Mexico included work for the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico City, an early example of his large-scale proficiency. Returning to the East Coast, Sihvonen held a succession of teaching posts: initially in Washington, DC, and then in New York City, first at Hunter College in 1954 and the following academic year at Cooper Union. Drawn to the southwestern landscape, Sihvonen moved to New Mexico, where he resided in Taos from 1956 through 1967. There, he painted sizeable geometric compositions with exuberant colors, which was atypical of Taos painters...

Jay Rosenblum Black Whole Signed and titled on the reverse Acrylic on canvas 18 x 32 inches Jay Rosenblum experimented with different versions of the "Visual Stripe motif" for more ...

Larry Zox Jean Jean, 1964 Signed, dated, and titled on the stretcher Liquitex on canvas 58 x 62 inches Provenance: Solomon & Co., New York Private Collection, NJ Estate of the above, 2023 Committed to abstraction throughout his career, Larry Zox played a central role in the Color Field discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. His work of the time, consisting of brilliantly colored geometric shapes in dynamic juxtapositions, demonstrated that hard-edge painting was neither cold nor formalistic. He reused certain motifs, but he did so less to explore their aspects than to “get at the specific character and quality of each painting in and for itself,” as James Monte stated in his essay for Zox’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. By the 1970s, Zox was using a freer, more emotive method, while maintaining the autonomy of color, which increasingly became more important to him than structure in his late years. Zox began to receive attention in the 1960s, when he was included in several groundbreaking exhibitions of Color Field and Minimalist art, including Shape and Structure (1965), organized by Henry Geldzahler for the Gallery of Modern Art, New York, and Systemic Painting (1966), organized by Lawrence Alloway for the Guggenheim Museum. In 1973, the Whitney’s solo exhibition of Zox’s work gave recognition to his significance in the art scene of the preceding decade. In the following year, Zox was represented in the inaugural exhibition of the Hirshhorn Museum, which owns fourteen of his works. Zox was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He attended the University of Oklahoma and Drake University. While studying at the Des Moines Art Center, he was mentored by George Grosz, who despite his own figurative approach encouraged Zox’s forays into abstraction. In 1958, Zox moved to New York, joining the downtown art scene. His studio on 20th Street became a gathering place for artists, jazz musicians, bikers, and boxers. He occasionally sparred with the visiting fighters. He later established a studio in East Hampton, where he painted and fished including using a helicopter to spot fish. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Zox’s works were collages consisting of painted pieces of paper stapled onto sheets of plywood. He then produced paintings that were illusions of collages, including both torn- and trued-edged forms, to which he added a wide range of intense hues that created ambiguous surfaces. Next, he omitted the collage aspect of his work and applied flat color areas to create more complete statements of pure color and shape. From 1962 to 1965, he produced his Rotation Series, at first creating plywood and Plexiglas reliefs, which turned squares into dynamic polygons. He used these shapes in his paintings as well, employing white as a foil between colors to produce negative spaces that suggest that the colored shapes had only been cut out and laid down instead of painted. The New York Times noted in 1964: “The artist is hip, cool, adventurous, not content to stay with the mere exercise of sensibility that one sees in smaller works.” In 1965, he began the Scissors Jack...

Ed Baynard Abstract (with Two White Vases), 2005 Signed, titled, and dated along the verso Acrylic on canvas 48 x 40 inches

Gene Hedge One, 1968 Signed and dated on the reverse Acrylic on canvas 53 3/8 x 32 inches (P118) Gene Hedge was born (1928) and raised in rural Indiana. After military service, he b...

Gene Hedge Untitled, circa 1970 Acrylic on canvas 48 x 18 inches (P056) Gene Hedge was born (1928) and raised in rural Indiana. After military service, he briefly attended Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. There he encountered the writing of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and the following year (1949) went to study at the Institute of Design in Chicago. He received a B.S. degree in Visual Design from the Institute of Design (1953), and he also took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago and began working in collage. During this period, the influence of Eugene Dana...

acrylic on canvas Dion Johnson’s paintings combine and explore dynamic opposites: expansiveness and compression, surface and depth, and darkness and light. Gradient color fields are...

acrylic on canvas Dion Johnson’s paintings combine and explore dynamic opposites: expansiveness and compression, surface and depth, and darkness and light. Gradient color fields are...

A great strong-edge painting by Naohiko Inukai, No. 16 is part of a series the artist created in the mid 1960s. Many from this series were shown at Inuk...

Created in a neutral palette apart from a crisp red descending line, Uncertain Terms encapsulates Ristvedt's response to the pandemic: cautious optimism. This hard-edge painting demo...

An original hard edge abstraction by American artist James Koenig. This work titled "Ribbon Structure #4" is part of the Draw Near exhibition currently on view at Benjaman Gallery

An original hard edge abstraction by American artist James Koenig titled "Cool Triangles. This work is part of Draw Near exhibition which opened at Benjaman Gallery on March 11. Th...