NEW YORK, NY.- Edelman Arts announced that the Gallery will be the exclusive New York representative for the estate of the major American Abstract Expressionist painter, sculptor, and collagist Fritz Bultman.

One of the epoch-defining artists in the group known as The Irascibles, Fritz Bultman’s place in art history was secured by 1950 thanks to a series of one-man exhibitions at some of the most prominent Manhattan and Provincetown galleries, as well as his inclusion in the blockbuster “Black or White” group show at the Samuel Kootz Gallery.

For four decades Bultman has been renowned for his meticulously organized abstract compositions, subtly challenging sculpture, and breakthrough expansion of the scale of collage. From the 1940s through the 1950s, Bultman’s powerful deployments of oil on canvas were admired by friends and rivals including Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann (his teacher), Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning. Hofmann wrote, “I consider him the most brilliant of all the many students I have had… He must be considered today the most outstanding, the most sincere and the most disciplined young artist of the entire younger generation and this in the international sense.” In 1962, Bultman began to work in collage, which would be his primary medium for the next two decades. His collages incorporated pre-painted paper in semi-figurative compositions, drawing upon years of psychotherapy to explore eroticism, symbolism, and myth.

A comprehensive solo exhibition of Fritz Bultman’s work will be on view at Edelman Arts from April 3 to May 11 2013. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by cultural historian Charles A. Riley II, PhD.

Fritz Bultman taught in New York at the Pratt Institute from 1950 to 1959, and at Hunter College from 1960 to 1960. In 1964-1965, he traveled to Paris with a fellowship from Fulbright. In 1968, he served as co-founder of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In addition, Bultman received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Bultman’s work has been exhibited widely, including one-man retrospectives at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Georgia Museum of Art, and Hunter College in New York. His work has appeared in numerous public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Provincetown, MA) and the New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans, LA). Edelman Arts has exhibited work by Bultman in the past, in “Abstraction: What Is Real” (March 2012), and in the Winter Group Show (December 2012). A monumental triptych by Fritz Bultman will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition “AB-EX RE-CON” at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn, New York from March 9–June 16, 2013.