?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 60,000 - $ 90,000
ALVIN D. LOVING, JR. (1935 - 2005) Cube 27.
Acrylic on shaped canvas, 1970. 1525x1295 mm; 60x51 inches (hexagonal). Signed and dated in ink, verso.
Provenance: the artist; personal collection of dealer William Zierler, New York; private Chicago collection.
Exhibited: Alvin Loving, William Zierler, Inc., New York, NY, September, 1973. Exhibition reviewed in Art in America, September-October, 1973, p. 110.
Cube 27 is a striking example of Loving's early shaped canvases of Minimalist geometric shapes. Inspired by Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers, Detroit-born Loving earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 1965. He began hard edge painting of cubes and hexagons in 1967. After his first one-person exhibition at Gertrude Kasle gallery in Detroit in 1969, Loving launched his New York career. Gertrude Kasle provided Loving with letters of introduction to Harold Hart of Martha Jackson Gallery and Steven Wilde and Bert Walker, curators at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he was given a critically acclaimed, one-person exhibition in 1969. 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 - except Edwards, all were abstract painters. The Whitney purchased his painting Rational Irrationalism. All the other works in the exhibition were sold privately and he signed with William Zierler Gallery.
Despite being prolific, we have located only a handful of paintings from this period. Loving only continued hard edge abstraction for one more year. Sharon Patton tells how Loving, inspired by an exhibition of abstract design in quilts at the Whitney Museum, cut up 60 of these canvases to start his new constructive phase in 1971. The artist's auction record was set at Swann Galleries with a hexagon-shaped painting on October 7, 2008. Patton p. 225.
