Works On Paper Unique Paintings, Watercolors, Pastels and Collages

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

Works On Paper

Unique Paintings, Watercolors, Pastels and Collages

Works On PaperUnique Paintings, Watercolors, Pastels and Collages

Online Presentation Featuring Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Hard Edge and Op Art Selections By:

Alcopley Ernst Benkert Dean Fleming Sonia Gechtoff Theo Hios George Hofmann James Kelly Oli Sihvonen Nina Tryggvadottir

George Hofmann, Untitled Drawing 28, 1978, Pastel on Arches paper, 30” x 42“

SONIA GECHTOFF (1926-2018)

Sonia Gechtoff Flag Icon, 1962-63, Pastel, graphite and collage, 1875" x 14.75"

Photo by Yao Zu Lu

Painting, drawing and collaging on paper and board were an integral part of Gechtoff’s art making and studio practice. Sometimes these works also became a large canvas. However, much of Gechtoff’s works on paper were stand-alone works and series that were created only on paper. She loved drawing and working with pencil, even on her large canvases, graphite was very frequently incorporated to emphasize and define an area, or for the purpose of modeling a shape to create the illusion of depth and volume.

Sonia Gechtoff, was born and raised in Philadelphia. After graduating in 1950 from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she moved to San Francisco in 1951 where she was greatly influenced by the painting of Clyfford Still. Teaching at the California School of Fine Art, she worked alongside Hassel Smith and Elmer Bischoff and associated with other Bay Area Abstract Expressionist painters such as Madeleine Diamond, Lilly Fenichel, Deborah Remington, Jay DeFeo and James Kelly, who she later married. San Francisco had a tremendous impact on Gechtoff, she was very much involved in the unique cultural scene and felt the local support. It is where she had some of her greatest career achievements, such as developing her bold use of the palette knife to create long, sharp strokes of pigment across the canvas and the corresponding early recognition with solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art (currently SFMoMA) and De Young Museum. Gechtoff moved to New York in 1958 and worked there until she passed away in early 2018. Given her interests in figuration, architecture, landscape and earth elements, representational elements became more prevalent in her paintings and drawings, while abstraction and gestural brush strokes remained constant. She switched from oil to acrylic paint and traded the palette knife for graphite to maintain strong defining strokes and boundaries in her work.

Most recently, Gechtoff’s early paintings from the 1950s were included in the very important exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism at the Denver Museum of Art in 2016 that subsequently traveled to the Mint Museum and the Palm Springs Museum of Art in 2017. Gechtoff’s artworks are included in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Achenbach Foundation, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Academy of Design, New York; Oakland Museum of Art, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Museum of Art, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California; and Worcester Museum of Art, Massachusetts, among others.

JAMES KELLY (1913 – 2003)

James Kelly Untitled, 1950, Oil stick on paper 19” x 25”

Photo by Yao Zu Lu

Drawing with pencil, ink, charcoal and oil stick as well as painting on paper and lithography were an integral part of James Kelly’s artistic practice. Most works on paper were conceived as unique works, not studies for larger paintings. Early in his career he focused heavily on lithography and worked at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Many of his lithographs are held in prominent collections, including the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, both in Washington, D.C.

James Kelly was known as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter. He was born and raised in Philadelphia. Kelly studied at the School of Industrial Arts (which is now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia) in 1937 and then in 1938 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts. In 1941 he was awarded a scholarship to the Barnes Foundation where he studied before enlisting in World War II. After the war, he moved to San Francisco and studied at the California School of the Arts under the GI Bill from 1951 to 54. There he met and married artist Sonia Gechtoff. They lived on Fillmore Street and became part of the Beat Scene and friends with Deborah Remington, Jay DeFeo, Madeleine Diamond, Ernest Briggs and Wally Hedrick, among others.

Early in Kelly’s career, in the 1940s, influenced by paintings by Piet Mondrian and later Pablo Picasso, his work was geometric with references to Modernism and Cubism. Following the move to California, Kelly’s work changed and was more gestural, with long smooth strokes and thick layers of impasto paint from generous use of the palette knife. He layered the pigment and worked the surfaces to reveal layers of colors under a heavily textured surface of black paint. Kelly also took up lithography and enjoyed making prints, working at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop numerous times through the 1960s and 70s.

The 1970s saw a bit of shift back to geometric work for Kelly, using grids and systemic approaches, a lot of ink with black and white reductive compositions. However, short lived and in the 1980s Kelly returned to sweeping broad gestures of bright color across the canvas with iconic spins, swirls and a dose of representational elements and hidden / camouflaged figures. His work was lyrical and playful, spontaneous with periods of humor. This maturity in his work from the 1980s and through the rest of his career became a reflection of him as a person, how he really thought and what made him happy.

ALCOPLEY (1910-1992)

Alcopley, Untitled 54-06 (ALC-OiCoP-54/06), 1954, Oil on paper, 41.5” x 29.5”, Framed size - 43.625” x 31.75” x 1.5”

Photo Yao Zu Lu

Alcopley (Alfred Lewin Copley) was born in Dresden, Germany in 1910 and exposed to vibrant avant-garde movements in his youth such as Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke. In1930 he attended medical school, interested in pursuing psychoanalysis, and then received his MD from the University of Heidelberg in 1935. It was here that Alcopley witnessed the rise of Hitler and the intolerance of intellectual pursuit, leading him to join the resistance and begin smuggling books out of the city. In 1936, on the verge of arrest, he fled Germany for Switzerland where he received his second MD and befriended many of the Dadaists. The following year Alcopley left for the United States and subsequently began pursuing his artistic career on equal ground as his scientific one, exhibiting his paintings for the first time. In 1942 Alcopley became part of the group of artists known as the New York School and later was a co-founder of The Club, a venue for weekly debates and discussions about art, frequented by critic Clement Greenberg and director of MoMA, Alfred H. Barr. In 1951 he exhibited in the historic Ninth Street Show, hung by Leo Castelli, alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline. After marrying the Icelandic painter Nina Tryggvadottir, the two lived in both Paris and London before returning to New York in the 1960s.

Alcopley’s work resides in prestigious collections internationally, such as: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Musee d’Art ed d’Industrie, Saint-Etienne; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden; National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

NINA TRYGGVADOTTIR (1913-1968)

Nina Tryggvadottir Abstraction (NT-CP-52-14), 1952, Collage and ink on paper 20” x 26.125”, Framed size 25.5” x 31.5”

Photo by Greg Zinniel

Nina Tryggvadottir was born in 1913 in Seyðisfjörður, on the East coast of Iceland, where she was raised before moving to Reykjavik with her parents. Tryggvadottir was interested in art from an early age and would take art lessons from her uncle, the landscape painter Ásgrímur Jónsson. In 1935 Tryggvadottir went to Copenhagen to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Art, following which, she lived in Paris. After returning to Iceland at the outbreak of WWII, she went to study in New York on a stipend from the Icelandic State. There, she studied under Morris Kantor, Hans Hoffman and Fernand Leger, and exhibited at the prestigious New Art Circle Gallery run by JB Neumann. She was asked to create stage sets and costumes for a staging of the famous ballet, Soldier’s Tale, by Igor Stravinsky and CF Ramus. After being banned from the US under McCarthyism, Tryggvadottir lived in Paris, where she exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne and London, where she showed works at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and also presented numerous solo exhibitions at galleries throughout Europe. She was permitted to move back to New York in 1959 where she lived and worked until the end of her life in 1968.

Tryggvadottir has exhibited internationally and her work resides in numerous private and public collections throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States, including: the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, France; The National Gallery of Iceland; The Reykjavik Municipal Art Gallery, Iceland; and Musee D’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France.

THEO HIOS (1908-1999)

Theo Hios, Untitled 3 & 4, 1970, Watercolor on paper, 17.5” x 11.75”

Photo by Yao Z

Theo Hios was born in the village of Trypi in Laconia in 1908. During his school years he lived in Sparta and later began law studies in Athens. Frustrated by the prospect of the profession, he migrated to the United States in 1929. During the Great Depression he worked in a restaurant while in his spare time he was trying to improve his English reading books of philosophy. In 1934, he began painting lessons in sections supported by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and continues to do lithography, engraving and frescoes until the end of the decade. His influences from expressionism, social realism, and Mexican frescoes cross over from his work. His subjects include landscapes, portraits and urban landscapes in which work is often visible through the depiction of workers or their tools. With the entry of the United States in World War II, Hios is ranked in the US Army where he attends martial arts lessons. He participates in battles in the Marshall Islands, Iwo Jima and Japan and is celebrated for his contribution. During the war, he will continue painting, depicting expressionistically and symbolically the horror of the war, an issue that will emerge in works after the end of the war and his return to New York. He continues to attend painting lessons, but soon decides to start his own design section, which was performed by artists such as Theodoros Stamos, Aristodemos Kaldis, Nassos Daphne, Michalis Lekakis and his sister, Katerina Lekaki, dancer, painter and he will marry Hios in 1947. In 1953 he will make a six-month trip throughout Greece, which will have a great impact on his work, as in the years to come his drawings and paintings dominate aspects of the Greek landscape. In 1963 he began to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York, a post he held until 1994. His painting gradually evolved towards the abstraction that appeared more prominently in the early 1960s and which would manifest itself perfectly from the circular formations that he made until the end of the 1970s. In these new images of concentric or deviant circles in square or circular canvas, Hios combines the spiritual with the secular, the Byzantine painting tradition with the movements of the Anita and astral body and attaches with painting language of his time. Often his works have titles from ancient Greek mythology (eg Labyrinth, Mars, Apollo). Since 1979, after a trip to Yellowstone Park, and in 1981, on another trip to Greece, he will return to representational painting. In 1998 he made his latest retrospective at the Susan Teller Gallery in New York. He died in 1999 in New York. Maris Spanoudakis Curator & Researcher

DEAN FLEMING (b. 1933, Santa Monica, CA)

Dean Fleming, Broome Street, 1964, Gouache on paper 4.125” x 6.125”, Paper size is 5” x 6.75” Mat size is 16” x 20“

Photo by Greg Zinniel

Dean Fleming studied at the California School of Fine Arts with Elmer Bischoff and Frank Lobdell. There, he developed life-long friendships with Peter Forakis, Leo Valledor and Mark di Suvero. He shared a studio with Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Bill Brown and Forakis and regularly exhibited at the Six Gallery and Batman Gallery in San Francisco.

Fleming moved to New York in 1961 and was a founding member of the Park Place Gallery, an important artist collective and exhibition venue for experimental art in lower Manhattan of New York in the 1960s. The founders (many transplants from the West Coast, were comprised of five painters: Dean Fleming, Tamara Melcher, David Novros, Edwin Ruda, Leo Valledor and five sculptors: Mark de Suvero, Peter Forakis, Robert Grosvenor, Anthony Magar and Forrest Myers; the gallery director was Paul Cooper) were interested in working with diverse materials and approaches in painting and sculpture to explore their mutual interest in literal and illusory space, music and social concerns. Moving to the Rocky Mountains in 1967 and founding Libre, an artist community, Fleming continued his extensive international travels and fascination with diverse cultures and artistic practices that inspired and informed his artwork.

In 1966, Fleming was included in the important exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, “Systemic Painting”, organized by Lawrence Alloway. Fleming’s artwork was recently included in several major museum exhibitions, including “Libre 50”, two survey exhibitions of fifty years of art from the Libre artist colony in Southern Colorado that was founded by Dean Fleming in the late 1960s, presented at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and Museum of Friends, Walsenburg, Colorado. Fleming’s artwork was also included in “Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950 – 1980”, organized by Kelly Baum in 2017 at the Met Breuer in New York as well as earlier in 2017 in the exhibition at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965”, curated by Melissa Rachleff. In 2008, Fleming and the members of the Park Place Gallery were the subject of the presentation, “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York”, organized by Linda Dalrymple Henderson at the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

Dean Fleming’s artworks are included in the collections of the Oakland Museum, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; Denver Museum of Art, Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; San Francisco Art Institute, California; Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C.; and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, among others.

OLI SIHVONEN (1921-1991)

Oli Sihvonen, Untitled (Pink and Black - (282), c 1980, Mixed media on paper 22.5” x 30”

Photo by Greg Zinniel

Oli Sihvonen, a minimalist, hard-edge painter, spent his career making abstract paintings and studying the interaction of geometric shapes, surfaces and the adjacency of colors and how those combinations influenced visual perception. Born in Brooklyn, New York, after World War II he studied at Black Mountain College where Josef Albers was a major influence and source of inspiration. After Black Mountain he lived between New Mexico and New York and taught at Hunter College and Cooper Union. His paintings were included in seminal exhibitions such as Geometric Abstraction In America, 1962, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Formalists, 1963, The Washington Museum of Contemporary Art, Washington, D.C.; and the legendary, The Responsive Eye, in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He also exhibited at Betty Parson’s and the Stable Gallery. Sihvonen was a recipient of grants from the Pollack Krasner Foundation in 1988, Adolph and Ester Gottlieb Foundation in 1985 and two from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1977 and 1967.

Selected Collections:

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Rockefeller University, New York, NY Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA Ashville Art Museum, Ashville, NC Albuquerque Museum of Art, Albuquerque, NM Black Mountain College Museum, Ashville, NC University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM Brandeis University, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA Harwood Foundation Museum of Art, Taos, NM New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM New York State Art Collection, Albany, NY Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM Worchester Art Museum, Worchester, MA

ERNST BENKERT (1928-2010)

Ernst Benkert, Composition, 1960, Gouache on paper, 10.875” x 9.75”

Photo by Greg Zinniel

Ernst Benkert was born in Chicago. Following WWII, he returned to Chicago to study at the Art Institute of Chicago and then earned his degree in Art History form Harvard University in 1953. In the late 50s, Benkert traveled and studied in Europe for several years and then worked toward his masters degree at Oberlin College, where he met artist Francis Hewitt who also introduced him to Edwin Mieczkoski. The three artists were passionate about geometric abstraction. In 1959 Benkert moved to New York and in 1960 shared a studio with Hewitt and Mieczkowsi, which was the beginning of their collaborations and formation of the Anonima Group. The Anonima Group was an early driving force exploring visual perception and pursuing Op Art and the only artist collective working in that movement in US. Other friends and participants in the Anonima group included Ad Reinhardt and Andor Weininger (a Bauhaus student and leader of the Bauhaus Band). Benkert exhibited regularly with the Anonima Group, including The Responsive Eye exhibition in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and at Denise René Gallery in Paris and the Martha Jackson Gallery, also in New York in 1965. The Anonima Group had a profound impact on Benkert’s artwork and he continued to exhibit with them through the 1960s. In 1966 Benkert began teaching at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn where he remained for 25 years. He also pursued his solo career beginning in the 1960s when he took over the loft on the Bowery previously occupied by Eva Hesse. Later in his career he spent more time in Vermont and remained friendly with Francis Hewitt who had moved to Vermont much earlier.

Benkert’s artworks are included the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Robert Hull Fleming Museum, Burlington, Vermont; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Most of Benkert’s drawing books and notebooks are housed in the Special Collections Library of the University of Vermont in Burlington.