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Will Cotton, Trigger, 2022, Huile sur toile, 244 × 183 × 3 cm, Crédit photo  : Atelier de l’artiste, Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON, Paris-Bruxelles-New York

TEMPLON, Paris-Bruxelles-New York

Aude Herlédan (French, b. 1966), To be moved -2022, Techniques mixtes sur toile - encadrement en chêne brun - 130 x 97 cm, ©1831 Art Gallery

1831 Art Gallery

WHITE CUBE

Al Held 1928 — 2005, Etats-Unis

Watercolours

  • Al Held, Particular Paradox #20, 1999, Watercolour on paper mounted on board, 43 1/4 x 59 3/8 in. (109.9 x 150.8 cm), 47 3/4 x 63 3/4 x 2 15/16 in. (121.3 x 162 x 7.4 cm) (framed)

Al Held, Particular Paradox #20, 1999, Watercolour on paper mounted on board, 43 1/4 x 59 3/8 in. (109.9 x 150.8 cm), 47 3/4 x 63 3/4 x 2 15/16 in. (121.3 x 162 x 7.4 cm) (framed)

Al Held watercolours
White Cube Paris

White Cube Paris is pleased to present an exhibition of watercolours by Al Held (19282005). An important facet within Held’s exploration of form, colour and space, this selection is testament to the ‘sheer, sensuous joy’ that Held felt when working with the medium and lends insight to the visionary, hard-edged abstraction that preoccupied the artist throughout his career.

Joyfully chromatic, with many using a warm colour palette, Held’s watercolours form a distinct body of work, demonstrating how he positioned the discipline in parallel to painting; they were a place where he could freely formulate ideas and willfully progress his imagery. This group of works was painted exclusively in Italy, where he maintained a studio from the late 1980s onwards following his prestigious American Academy residency in Rome. To provide him with a place to work in creative isolation, Held purchased a historic farmhouse in Umbria to complement his New York abodes, a Manhattan loft and Catskills barn.

Associated in his early years with a generation of American abstract painters, Held was drawn to Europe early on in his career, taking advantage of the GI Bill to move to Paris between 1951 and 1953, and acquaint himself with the Old Masters and European avant garde. Later on, when he spent time in Italy, Held committed to an intensive study of Renaissance painting, in order to widen his vocabulary at the service of his increasingly complex and monumental paintings.

Produced around the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Italian watercolours – like the paintings of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, and Michelangelo which he so admired – are suffused with light, appearing almost translucent as if lit from within. Most profoundly, watercolour offered Held a way to fill his images with light, lifting his solid forms into weightless mass.

In these watercolours, several of which are extremely large in scale, Held focused on constructing multidimensional space through a command of paradoxical structures and layered perspectives. Playing with a muscular geometry, and exploiting his demonstrable facility in draftsmanship, Held harnessed the medium’s potential for transparency to layer and fuse his forms, resolving his semi-illusionistic compositions with an immediacy that belies their carefully organised interlocking structures.

Held’s status as an exceptional colourist as well as a pioneer of hard edge abstraction is confirmed by his watercolours. Colliding perspectives and impossible trajectories, they produce the feeling of vast and vertiginous volumetric expanse, as if we are looking on the edge of ever-receding, three-dimensional space in which sinuous ribbons thread through patterned planes and architectonic forms loom large towards the viewer with magical intensity. The repeated motif of immense interlocking rings set in deep recessive space reflects his work on public murals at the time, while the domes, arcades and coffering might point to Italian Renaissance architecture.

Both finished works and prologues to the paintings, Held’s watercolours visualise a depth of understanding beyond human perception, touching as they do on themes as unfathomable as multidimensionality and String Theory. Reflecting his preoccupation with the poetic re-interpretation of scientific theory and his thoughts on the multiverse, Held was able to channel the past and the future into these luminous, visionary works. As Barbara Rose has written: ‘In the landscape where the Renaissance was born, [Held] drew and redrew paradoxical and conflicting forms floating in an infinite and uncharted space.’

Al Held was born in Brooklyn in 1928 and died in Todi, Italy in 2005. He exhibited extensively throughout his career including solo exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1966); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC (1968); ICA, Philadelphia (1968); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1969); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974); and ICA, Boston (1978), among other museums. He produced major public artworks in prominent cities around the USA including Philadelphia, Washington DC, New York and Orlando. Held’s work features in many museums and public collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Kunstmuseum, Basel.

 

Exhibition from April 19 to May 27, 2023. Closed on Sunday, May 28th.

10 Avenue Matignon
75008 Paris, France
01 87 39 85 97 whitecube.com

The gallery

White Cube’s exhibition programme extends across locations in London, Hong Kong, Paris, New York, West Palm Beach and online. Since its inception in 1993, the gallery has exhibited the work of many of the world’s most highly acclaimed contemporary artists.

Gallery artists

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Etel Adnan, Darren Almond, Ellen Altfest, David Altmejd, Michael Armitage, Christine Ay Tjoe, Miroslaw Balka, Georg Baselitz, Bram Bogart, Chuck Close, Julie Curtiss, Tracey Emin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Katharina Fritsch, Theaster Gates, Gilbert & George, Louise Giovanelli, Antony Gormley, Andreas Gursky, David Hammons, Mona Hatoum, Al Held, Damien Hirst, Klára Hosnedlová, Marguerite Humeau, Robert Irwin, Sergej Jensen, Anselm Kiefer, Rachel Kneebone, Imi Knoebel, Liu Wei, Danica Lundy, Ibrahim Mahama, Christian Marclay, Dóra Maurer, Josiah McElheny, Julie Mehretu, Beatriz Milhazes, Harland Miller, Sarah Morris, Bruce Nauman, Isamu Noguchi, Minoru Nomata, Gabriel Orozco, Virginia Overton, Park Seo-Bo, Eddie Peake, Magnus Plessen, Jessica Rankin, Doris Salcedo, Cinga Samson, Ilana Savdie, Raqib Shaw, Haim Steinbach, Takis TARWUK, Fred Tomaselli, Danh Vo, Jeff Wall

Galerie sélectionnée par Alicia Knock

In the thematic « Contemporary Art »

Ana Maria Tavares, Deviant topographies from Paxton to Burle Marx II. Courtesy : the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA

GALLERIA CONTINUA

Sabrina Mezzaqui 1964, Italie

Di punto in bianco

• ⁣⁣

Giovanni Ozzola 1982, Italie

For a little while

•

Ana Maria Tavares 1958, Brésil

Sortir du silence : au-delà de la modernité

Pierre Tal Coat, Colza, huile sur bois, vers 1975, 24 x 16,5 cm - Galerie Berthet Aittouares

Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès

Pierre Tal Coat 1905 — 1985, France

Peintures

Variation 140 
Photograph (2021), Pigment ink on Fine Art Hahnemühle PhotoRag Baryta paper 315gsm 
75 x 60 cm
Edition 3 + 1AP

Bigaignon

Fernando Marante (en dialogue avec Hans Kooi)

Ballet Mécanique

In the thematic « Moderne Art »

Fred Deux, 2013, encre de Chine et peinture cellulosique sur papier, 50 x 32 cm (courtesy Galerie Alain Margaron)

Galerie Alain Margaron

Bleu — Group show

DEBRE Olivier (1920-1999)
Composition 1951
Huile sur toile
Monogrammée et datée en bas à droite, annotée au dos 17-XII-46
64X53 cm

GALERIE FAIDHERBE

Parcours abstrait de l’après-guerre à nos jours — Group show

Ecole italienne, Nature morte d'objets scientifiques, XVIIe siècle. Courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff. Ph. François Doury

Galerie Jocelyn Wolff

Grisaille Vertigo

Exposition collective - commissariat d’exposition par François-René Martin

In the tour « 8e/9e arrondissement »

Amédée Ozenfant, Guitare, bouteilles et verre à pied, Vers 1925, Craies et pastel sur papier, 47 x 35 cm

Galerie Raphaël Durazzo

Perspectives Puristes — Group show

Chen Jiang-Hong copyright Fabrice Gousset

Galerie Taménaga

CHEN JIANG-HONG 1963, Chine

« Les voyages intérieurs de CHEN Jiang-Hong »

Salvo, San Nicola Arcella, 2008, Oil on canvas, 42 x 52 cm | 16 1/2 x 20, 1/2 inch, Unique, #72492

Perrotin

Salvo 1947 — 2015, Italie

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