LONDON.- Pace London presents IMPULSE, an exhibition that examines American abstract painting in the 1960s and 70s, co-curated by Tamara Corm, Senior Director at Pace London, and Amelie von Wedel and Pernilla Holmes, Wedel Art. Charting unprecedented experiments in pure colour, improvisational techniques and the sculptural potential of painting, IMPULSE features works by Frank Bowling, Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland that demonstrate the freeform and highly innovative breakthroughs in abstraction in this period. IMPULSE is on view at Pace, 6 Burlington Gardens, from 3 November – 22 December 2017.
The ‘60s and ‘70s were a radical time in the history of abstract painting in America. Emerging from the dominance of Abstract Expressionism in the ‘50s, Frank Bowling, Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland each experimented with new techniques to push the language of abstract painting forward. While Noland eliminated highly personal, gestural expression in favour of hard-edged abstraction, others poured, dripped, and pushed paint across the surface of the canvases. Many had the desire to break down the distinction between painting and sculpture, to create paintings that were physical objects as well as abstractions. Ed Clark and Kenneth Noland, for example, shaped their canvases, using their unconventional forms as vehicles for colour, while Sam Gilliam beveled the edges of his canvases and eventually took them off the stretcher all together. Pre-eminent art critic Clement Greenberg initially influenced these artists – Bowling, who talked to Greenberg almost daily, recalls that “Clem spoke for us all.” Despite Greenberg’s importance, many of the artists later experimented beyond the ideals and conventions disseminated in his writings. As part of the same cultural network in New York and Washington D.C., yet working individually, the artists on view exchanged ideas and often exhibited together. In 1971, Noland, Clark and Gilliam showed together in the seminal de luxe show , which explored the potency of colour in post-painterly abstraction and was one of the first racially-integrated exhibitions in America.
As part of the Washington Color School in Washington D.C., Louis, Noland and later Gilliam emphasised the primacy of colour and frequently used acrylic paints on unprimed canvas. Highlights of the exhibition include Noland’s Indo (1977), a shaped canvas that reveals the emotional effects and expressive potential of colour and form. As explained by Adam Pendleton, “The precision that abstraction requires is often not understood. Noland renders targets, stripes, chevrons as potential, as abstraction. Articulating the seemingly unintelligible through form.” Louis stained his raw canvases by pouring and folding, often leaving large expanses untouched, as demonstrated by the veil painting Plentitude (1958). In this work, Louis manipulated the angle of the stretcher and varied the tautness of the canvas to direct the poured paint and achieve a tapered effect. Gilliam similarly experimented with the application of his acrylic paint; in May III (1972), he crumpled and folded the canvas while staining it with paint in order to produce innovative effects. As in Louis’ work, in this brushless abstraction, the colours bleed together rhythmically. In After Micro W #2, Gilliam continues his dappled, soak-stained technique and removes the canvas from the stretcher, choosing instead to drape the fabric directly from the wall and break down the boundary between painting and sculpture.
In New York, Bowling and Clark eschewed the use of paint brushes in their search for pure, formal abstraction. In the early 70s, Bowling created a mechanism to pour paint directly onto canvas, mixing and manipulating colours and textures to create Poured Paintings such as Curtain (1974) and Lenoraseas (1976). An early proponent of shaped canvases in the ‘50s, Ed Clark began using a large push-broom to push paint across the surface of the canvas in the 60s, creating subtly blended and thickly textured stripes of paint such as those in Yucatan Beige (1976), in which the stripes traverse beyond the central ellipse. For Clark, “the floors in New York or Paris are his easels… Gallons, quarts and pints of paint are scattered around [the edges of] his canvas. Each has colors of prime importance.” (Ted Joans, Clark and I, Edward Clark: For the sake of the Search, (Belleville Lake, Michigan: Belleville Lake Press, 1997), p.33 )
The works in IMPULSE have rarely been exhibited in the United Kingdom. Despite their renown in the ‘70s, most of the artists in IMPULSE were largely overlooked in art history for many years. More recently, their works are being reevaluated in major exhibitions such as Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern, Bowling’s recent survey exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor at the Haus Der Kunst and Gilliam’s upcoming solo-exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel. IMPULSE brings these artists’ works together with those of their traditionally better-known peers – Noland and Louis – to reveal how the artists exchanged ideas and developed new methods and techniques in parallel with each other.
Jazz was often a source of inspiration for some of these artists, and a metaphor for how they worked. Between 1960 and the late 1970s, experimental labels such as Columbia and El Saturn released jazz by musicians including John Coltrane, Gil Evans, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Colman and Sun Ra. These musicians took the principles of free jazz to extremes with their embrace of improvised melodies and techniques. Their approaches are echoed in the precociously experimental practices of some of the artists in the exhibition. Noland described jazz musicians as “fellow modernists” and linked painting in this period to music: “What was new was the idea that something you painted could be like something you heard.” (quoted in Karen Wilkin, Kenneth Noland (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), p. 8)
