?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
ALVIN D. LOVING, JR. (1935 - 2005) 9 Septehedrons.
Assemblage of nine joined shaped canvases, each acrylic on canvas, 1969. Approximately 1400x1930mm; 55x76 inches. Each 533 mm; 21 inches diameter (hexagonal).
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private New York collection, 1970.
This painting is an outstanding example of Loving's experimental work from the late 1960s--and the first of his assembled geometric compositions to come to auction. Inspired by Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers, Detroit-born Loving earned an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan in 1965. Loving began hard edge painting of cubes and hexagons in 1967. He launched his New York career after his first solo exhibition with Gertrude Kasle Gallery in Detroit in 1969. Gertrude Kasle provided Loving with letters of introduction to Harold Hart of Martha Jackson Gallery and Steven Weil and Berta Walker of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In 1969, Loving enjoyed extraordinary success with a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitney that included a similar pyramid-shaped 6 Septehedrons painting, illustrated in the exhibition pamphlet. Loving was the first of a group of African-American artists whose work was shown at the Whitney during the 1970s, including Frank Bowling, Frederick Eversley, Melvin Edwards and Alma Thomas--all, except Edwards, were abstract painters. The Whitney exhibition led to the museum's purchase of Loving's monumental 1969 painting Rational Irrationalism. Two other large, geometric paintings are now in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE.
