Howard Mehring
dal 12/4/2007 al 11/5/2007
Segnalato da
12/4/2007
Howard Mehring
Conner Contemporary Art, Washington
Mehring has been called the "sleeping giant" of Washington Color Painting and was the first of the second generation of Color Field painters to explore the potentials of color through novel experiments with painting techniques including pouring, staining, stippling, and sectional painting.
All Over Paintings
Conner Contemporary Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of rarely seen all over
paintings by Howard Mehring. Mehring has been called the "sleeping giant" of
Washington Color Painting and was the first of the second generation of Color Field
painters to explore the potentials of color through novel experiments with painting
techniques including pouring, staining, stippling, and sectional painting.
Washington Color Field painting, the most significant artistic movement in the
cultural history of Washington, DC, has experienced a resurgence of interest in the
past few years with recent exhibitions of Morris Louis, Thomas Downing, Howard
Mehring, Gene Davis and Sam Gilliam in private and public galleries. This
distinctive and influential style emerged between 1958 and 1962 through the works of
a group of painters who formulated responses to the Abstract Expressionist mode of
painting then prevalent in New York. Moving away from the gestural application of
thick oil paints characteristic of the New York School, Washington Color Field
painters developed new methods in which they applied thin layers of magna paint on
unsized canvas to achieve effects of disembodied color on expansive picture planes.
Early in his career, Mehring created innovative abstract paintings in distinctive
all over styles, so called because the artist eschewed a central focal point in
favor of a uniform presentation of saturated color. These canvases were best known
for their breathing, pulsating, lyrical expressions of color, which the artist
identified with tonal qualities of music.
In the course of his career Mehring was recognized as one of the leading Washington
Color painters and his work was exhibited in private galleries in Washington, New
York, Los Angeles and Munich. Mehring's paintings were also exhibited in landmark
shows such as the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, curated by Clement Greenberg, and the 1966 Systemic Painting exhibition at
New York's Guggenheim Museum curated by Lawrence Alloway. The artist was the subject
of a retrospective exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC in
1977. Today, Mehring's work is held in many prominent permanent collections
including the Tate Gallery, London, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The National Gallery of Art, Washington,
DC.
Image: Spring Is (installation view, Conner Contemporary Art)
Conner Contemporary Art
1730 Connecticut Avenue - Washington