?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 80,000 - $ 120,000
KENNETH VICTOR YOUNG (1933 - 2017) Untitled (Abstract Composition).
Acrylic on cotton canvas, 1972. 2007x2997 mm; 79x118 inches. Signed and dated "72" in ink on the canvas overflap, upper edge verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Washington, DC (1972); private collection, Pittsburgh.
This monumental canvas of fiery colors and floating orbs is a wonderful example of the abstract painting of Kenneth Young, the Washington DC color field painter who is regaining national recognition today, and is his largest painting to come to auction. Young was associated in the early 1970s with the rise of the Washington Color School; in 1968, he had a solo exhibition at the Franz Bader Gallery in Washington, DC.
Born in Kentucky, Young's career began in the sciences - he studied and taught physics at Indiana University and chemical engineering at the University of Louisville. After moving to Washington, DC, he went on to work at the Smithsonian Institution for over 35 years as an exhibition installation designer. He was also an art instructor at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC. Young also had solo exhibitions at the Carl Van Vechten Gallery at Fisk University in 1973, and at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC in 1974. His paintings have also been included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery and the Washington Project for the Arts, and are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago, IL.
