Apr 05, 2018 - Sale 2472

Sale 2472 - Lot 133

Price Realized: $ 93,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 60,000 - $ 90,000
ED CLARK (1926 - )
Untitled.

Acrylic on linen canvas, 1990. 1295x1575 mm; 51x62 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto. Signed, dated "Aug 1999", dedicated "To Danny" and inscribed "Acrylic Medium, Painted 1990, 51" x 62" inches, Untitled" in pencil, verso.

Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Philadelphia (1999).

This dynamic and beautiful canvas by Ed Clark is the largest painting by the artist to come to auction. It dates from his 1990 New York series - other works from this mid-career period were included in his submission of the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. Clark's painting from this period displays some of his most daring brushwork - focusing on the gesture, Clark vigorously pushes paint across the canvas on the floor, and pushes the expressiveness of his abstraction to its limits.

Inspired by a visit to Jack Whitten in Crete in 1971, Ed Clark began to travel to various foreign countries to paint - including Nigeria, Martinique, Bahia and Morocco - through the 1980s. Kellie Jones wrote in 1990 for the exhibiton Art Space catalogue - "The artist's travels to parts of the world have, in a sense, kept his work fresh and consistently exciting. Each trip has inspired a change or variation in color, materials, and approach to two-dimensional space. The resulting series of paintings records the memory of experience and translates it into the language of gesture." Between 1989 and 1991, Clark exhibited internationally at Gallery Kesser-Bohbot, Hamburg, Germany, Galerie Resche, Paris, France, Spiral Gallery, Brooklyn, Isobel Neal Gallery, Chicago, FIAC, Grand Palais, Paris, France, and G.R. N'Namdi Gallery, Birmingham, MI. His subsequent series include Paris from 1993-1995 and Egypt in 1998.