For press information, contact: Courtney Kennedy or Nancy Eckhardt, 214.969.9410
Leading New York Painter, Al Held, to Debut Monumental Watercolors in DallasPillsbury and Peters Fine Art of Dallas has arranged to exhibit the monumental watercolors by New York-based Al Held, one of the most influential and important abstract artists of the Post-War era, it was announced today by C.E.O., Edmund (Ted) Pillsbury. Comprising a major body of new work, more than thirty pieces, the bold compositions were conceived and executed over the past three years in Italy and are being shown and published for the first time in the Dallas exhibition, which opens Friday, May 18. The exhibit will remain on view through July 7 and will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring a definitive essay, "The Construction, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction of Abstraction", by the noted author and critic, Barbara Rose, who guest-curated the exhibit. The exhibit will have a second showing at Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, in the Fall.
In announcing the project, Dr. Pillsbury stated: "Al Held is surely one of America's greatest living painters and his influence on a generation of younger artists, both here and abroad, cannot be underestimated. The Dallas Gallery is proud to have received permission to show the works for the first time. The watercolors form an independent body of work that contributes to the development of American painting while complementing Held's work in other media."
Held's geometric shapes and objects float in ambiguous space, projecting at sharp angles, both within and without the defined interiors of the field, suggesting spatial depth but with no sense of representation or reality. Rather, the images appear as dreamscapes with undulating backgrounds that dazzle the eye with their rich, colorful patterns. About his own work, Held remarks, "Art has to communicate directly, feeding the eye with the opulent pictorialism that made the old masters rich and appealing. The idea that linear perspective or light or modeling are married to representation is false."
The importance of Al Held's watercolors is fully explored in Ms. Rose's introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue. "For Al Held," she writes, "painting has to reincorporate what made painting vital and creative, not by copying old masters but as examples of richness of language in the twenty-first century. Viewers suspect Held derives ideas from computer imagery, but the fact is the work evolves in an entirely intuitive fashion out of the artist's own capacity for extrapolating spatial fantasies. Held's method remains that of Cézanne: revision, consideration, correction and further revision and refining until the whole is brought into balance."
Al Held was born in 1928 in New York City. After attending the Art Students League, he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumièrie in Paris with Ossip Zadkine. After returning to the United States, he accepted an appointment on the faculty of the Yale University Art School where he remained through the 1970's. In 1981, Held was an Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome, eventually settling in Italy in the picturesque Umbrian hilltown of Todi, where he now goes on a regular basis for extended periods of time and where he produced the watercolors in this exhibition. Al Held has exhibited widely and his work is represented in major public and private collections throughout the world. He is the subject of a major monograph written by Irving Sandler and published in 1984 by Hudson Hills Press, New York.
Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art is located at 2913 Fairmount at the corner of Cedar Springs. The Gallery is open Monday through Friday 10:00 am to 6:00 pm, Saturday 11:00 am to 5:00 pm, and by appointment. For further information, contact the Gallery by telephone at 214-969-9410, by facsimile at 214-969-9023, or by e-mail at info@ppfineart.com. For further information on gallery activities and programs, visit the website at www.pillsburypetersfineart.com.
