Electric Op
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY
September 27, 2024 – January 27, 2025
Bringing together more than ninety works spanning six decades, Electric Op examines how artists have used abstraction to explore the relationship between perception and technology. Curated by Tina Rivers Ryan, the show convincingly makes the case for Op art as the first artistic movement of the Information Age, paving the way for art to be abstracted into analog and digital circuits. Jimmy's Painting (1972), seen here, and Piero's Piazza (1982) are the two Held paintings in the show, largely drawn from the museum's permanent collection. Although computers played no part in the development of his imagery, Held's work anticipated contemporary concerns with its visualization of spatial complexity and contradiction. The exhibition travels to the Musée d'arts de Nantes, where it will be on view from April 4 to September 1, 2025.
Al Held: Works on Paper, 1960–1989
McClain Gallery, Houston
September 3 – November 2, 2024
We are pleased to announce McClain Gallery in Houston, TX has just opened Al Held: Works on Paper, 1960–1989, a focused exhibition of the artist’s drawings. Spanning almost three decades, the works trace the evolution of Held’s painting practice during this period, reflecting the gradual shifts and refinements in his approach. These changes are made evident in the different functions drawing and sketching came to play for the artist, first as a warm-up exercise and research tool to find new shapes and approaches into the pictorial plane, then as a preparatory tool for the immensely complex late paintings.
Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts
September 3, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Al Held spent a transformative two years in Paris in the early 1950s. And he was not alone. Hundreds of American artists—many of them veterans like Held travelling on the GI Bill—studied and lived in a thriving postwar scene, experimenting with new forms and materials while rubbing elbows with Léger and Picasso. This story is the subject of the engrossing exhibition Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 at New York University’s Grey Art Museum (formerly Gallery). Curated by scholar Debra Bricker Balken and director Lynn Gumpert, the exhibition and catalogue provide in-depth information and generous selections of works. The Al Held Foundation lent three works that Al created towards the end of his time in Paris, completing his evolution from social realist to abstract expressionist. The exhibition is on view through July 20, then travels to the Addison Gallery of American Art in September and NYU Abu Dhabi in February 2025.