Jack Youngerman
Frieze New York
Booth SP32
Hervé Bize is pleased to announce its third participation in Frieze New York 2018.
The gallery will be exhibiting work by Jack Youngerman who is one of the greatest American artists in the field of abstract painting, since over sixty years and continues to be a significant figure. Given the fact this project will be part of the Spotlight section, we will not present works after 2000.
Jack Youngerman was born on March 25, 1926, in Saint Louis, Missouri. He lives and works in Long Island.
After college and with help from the G.I. Bill, he arrived in Paris in 1947 in order to enrol the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, remaining in the city to paint until 1955. He met and married the actress Delphine Seyrig. Delphine’s father was Henri Seyrig, an influential archaeologist and future director of the Musées de France.
Youngerman visited the studios of Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi in Paris, among others and while overseas, he traveled across Europe and to the Middle East (1952-56), even worked on architectural projects in Lebanon and Iraq.
In Paris, he also realized very early, with François Morellet and Ellsworth Kelly, that he did not want to be involved in a soft kind of abstract impressionism or something close and began to incorporate into his paintings the Hard-edge, geometric-abstraction elements.
In 1956, at gallerist Betty Parsons’s urging, Youngerman returned to the USA, settling in New York and forming the Coenties Slip group with Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin (last year The Menil Collection has presented a remarkable exhibition about it).
His work started to emphasise simplified organic forms and geometric abstraction evidencing the artist’s sustained dedication to the formal elements of shape, space, and color.
Youngerman was featured alongside contemporaries such as Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly again, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella in 16 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New Yorkin 1959. Since his first solo show of geometric abstractions at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris (1951), Youngerman has had many important solo exhibitions, including ones at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York (1976 and 2004) and a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1986).
Youngerman’s work has been acquired by major museums including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo ; Art Institute of Chicago ; Baltimore Museum of Art ; Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art, Pittsburgh ; Foundation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France ; High Museum, Atlanta ; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington ; The Phillips Collection, Washington ; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark ; The Menil Collection, Houston ; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis ; MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York ; Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble , France ; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York ; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York ; Yale University Art Center, New Haven.
The selection of works for Frieze New York will span several decades including mostly pieces from the 1950s and the 1960s, both paintings and works on paper.