Richard Pousette-Dart

📖 The Scoop

East River Studio will focus on a body of work Pousette-Dart produced from 1946-51 while living and working in a former brewery on East 56th Street. It was in this studio that he painted Symphony Number 1, The Transcendental, 1941-42, which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and which at the time covered an entire wall of the studio. In an address he once gave Pousette-Dart said, "The sizes of my paintings in the early days were often determined by the largest roll of canvas I could afford to buy and the largest wall I could tack it on." A number of the works in this exhibition began as larger canvases he cut down to accommodate both his working space and the gallery spaces in which he was exhibiting. Pousette-Dart then actively reworked these smaller canvases, later mounting them on supports to retain their edges. This direct, synthetic approach was characteristic of his approach to painting during this period. He experimented with and combined a wide variety of techniques and materials, from enamels to gold leaf, silver leaf, charcoal and sand, giving the works an almost alchemical quality. A catalogue will be published on the occasion of the exhibition, featuring an essay by Robert Storr as well as a conversation between Christopher Wool and Joanna Pousette-Dart. -- Publisher's website.

Genre: Art / General (fancy, right?)