|
Michael Loew: Works on Paper from the 1940s and 1950s will be on view at Meredith Ward Fine Art from March 20 through April 25, 2009. The twenty watercolors and drawings in the show, drawn entirely from the artist’s estate, will focus on the crucial period just after World War II when Michael Loew developed his distinctive language of abstraction. Throughout these years, Loew absorbed the tenets of modernism to create his own joyfully exuberant style. An illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
One of the major proponents of Abstract Expressionism and influenced by the Neo-Plasticism of Mondrian, Michael Loew circulated among the upper echelons of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. Despite their opposing approaches to abstraction, he became a longtime friend of Willem de Kooning, whom he met completing WPA projects during the 1930s. Writing about their relationship, Rose C. S. Slivka writes, “They [de Kooning and Loew] generally agreed on most things, including the recognition that although each was on opposite sides of the coin, it was the same coin. ‘Yours,’ said Michael Loew to Willem de Kooning, ‘is the lyrical grid.’ ‘And yours,’ said Willem to Michael, ‘is the song that breaks bars. I could learn plenty from you’” (“Willem de Kooning,” Art Journal, Fall 1989: pp. 219-221.).
After World War II, Loew studied with Hans Hofmann and cultivated his sensibility for color effects. He used the grid-structure of Mondrian as a base from which to experiment with the possibilities of the palette, to focus on subtle transitions of tone and harmony of color relationships. Drawing inspiration from life, he transformed subjects into unique patterns of rectangles or color fields, naming the final composition according to the dominant colors. He exhibited these works at the Stable Gallery annuals, beginning a full and successful exhibition career.
In 1957, Loew participated in the International Association of Plastic Arts touring exhibition, Contemporary American Painting, where he showed alongside Milton Avery, Josef Albers, de Kooning, Ad Reinhardt, and others. The same year he gained representation at Zabriskie Gallery, next to Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Rauschenberg. Loew’s work is represented in numerous museums around the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley.
|
return to artnet.com
