Mixed media on cream wove paper, circa 1970-72. 432x559 mm; 17x22 inches. Signed in pencil, lower left.
Provenance: the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York; private collection, Chicago.
This dynamic abstraction is an excellent example of Ed Clark's development of abstraction within the oval format in the early 1970s. This study shows how Clark developed his iconic gestural broom painting of layered colors through works on paper.
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Ed Clark studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1946 to 1951, and in 1952 at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he lived until 1958. George Sugarman then persuaded him to return to New York to help found the Brata Gallery with Ronald Bladen, Al Held and others. Clark exhibited there until 1966, when he returned to France for three more years. He acknowledged the influence of the paintings of Nicolas de Stael and the music of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, and later the gestural abstractions of Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. 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.
