News

We are pleased to announce Al Held's participation in "Singing in Unison, Part 12: Painting in Space" at Art Cake in Brooklyn, NY. Featuring work by Al Held, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, and Frank Stella, the show is presented by Rail Curatorial Projects and M. David & Co., and curated by Michael David. This exhibition features a selection of works made in the 1980s and ’90s, when all four artists were deeply preoccupied with shared visions of painting in space, and fearlessly examined, explored, and evaluated fundamental issues of dimensionality, flatness, boundary, and material application.

This exhibition is devoted to a pivotal decade in Held's career: the 1970s. The presentation features eleven rarely exhibited marker drawings from the early '70s, alongside two monumental paintings from the artist’s celebrated "Return to Color" series of the early 1980s. It is a testament to Held’s resourcefulness that he embraced markers as a serious medium for drawing. While the free-flowing ink of markers is often associated with looseness and informality, Held employed them with rigor and precision. Working with rulers, compasses, and stencils at his drafting table, he produced geometric abstractions that tested the effects of color on volumetric forms and spatial construction.

A vibrant pigment painting by Al Held features in the current exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University reexamining abstract painting and sculpture of the 1940s and '50s. Other artists in the show working with the period’s loose brushwork and gestural strokes include Romare Bearden, Dorothy Dehner, Hans Hofmann, and Manuel Neri. Held’s thickly layered gestural painting, Untitled, c. 1957, has been in the Nasher collection since 2016 and here appears in conversation with a recently acquired abstract painting by Roy Lichtenstein, together pointing the way to the new hard edge imagery of the 1960s.