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12/4/2002

George McNeil

ACA Galleries, New York

ACA Galleries presentst Bathers, Dancers and Abstracts, a themed retrospective emphasizing George McNeil’s use of the Hofmann legacy and Provincetown subjects.

The exhibition will travel to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Provincetown, MA (June 14 - July 21, 2002). A color catalogue is available with essays by Lillian Orlowsky, Paul Resika and Peter Selz and excerpts from McNeil’s art notebooks.

Born in Brooklyn in 1908, George McNeil’s career spanned the whole of the postwar American art era. After training as a painter at Pratt Institute, the Art Students’ League and with Hans Hofmann in the 1930s, he became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936 and one of the few abstract artists to work for the WPA.

A pioneer Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, McNeil was also an influential and inspiring teacher. During his lifetime McNeil had over 40 solo exhibitions, beginning in Havana, Cuba in 1941. In 1989 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

McNeil's work ranges from early geometric Cubism through vivid abstractions to figural abstracts and the later complex figural and topographical compositions, always distinguished by his use of high-key color. Working on the studio floor, McNeil moved around his canvases, layering, scraping, collaging, and encrusting thick impasto to create painterly canvases filled with wit, verve and passion.

His work can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Newark Museum, NJ; and the Detroit Institute, MI, among others.
...Trying to make my paintings come alive, pictorially and psychologically is an attempt to celebrate the pulsating vividness of being, mostly joyously but sometimes somberly as well. In both cases I go toward a liberating form, for breaking experience, for going further...freedom leading to more freedom. George McNeil August 17th, 1989

Image: Decisions, 1992 Oil on canvas 64 x 78 inches

ACA Galleries
529 West 20th Street, 5th floor New York, New York 10011
Opening hours: 10:30 - 18:00

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