This exhibition will feature a selection of prints covering the artist’s prolific body of graphic works from 1973 to 1999.
Al Held is primarily known as one of the pioneers of hard-edged abstraction. His controlled, reductive paintings and works on paper are composed with a sophisticated vocabulary of geometric shapes meant as a direct rebuttal to the Abstract Expressionists a generation before him. The exhibition, in collaboration with the Al Held Foundation, is comprised of etchings, screen prints, woodcuts, and unique hand worked proofs that span the artist’s career. Held combined his clean color palette with a variety of forms to create dynamic spatial relationships. This exhibition demonstrates the energy and diversity of his imagery in prints, some of which were published by Pace Prints.
Al Held was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. He began his artistic studies at the Art Students League and subsequently traveled to Paris under the GI Bill in 1950 to study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere until 1953. Returning to New York, Held quickly became one of the leading avant-garde artists in the burgeoning downtown art scene. He was appointed Associate Professor of Art at Yale University in 1962, where he remained on the faculty until 1980. Beginning in 1981, the artist returned to Europe and settled part time in Tuscany.
A mid-career retrospective was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 and the artist has been included in many solo and group exhibitions. Held passed away at his home outside of Todi, Italy in 2005. His work is included in numerous public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others.