Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to present Expanding Space: Ronald Bladen, Al Held, Yvonne Rainer and George Sugarman, November 2nd through December 21st, 2017. This exhibition examines four closely-knit friends and artists who shared a complex personal, intellectual, and artistic history. Convening in New York in the late 1950s, their passionate debates and give- and-take of ideas lent intensity and rigor to their creative endeavors. Carving out new artistic ground, they adopted a mode of minimal art making that was reductive, powerful, and playful.
In 1965, Irving Sandler grouped these visual artists together in his exhibition Concrete Expressionism because they were close in “attitude” to each other. This attitude extended to Rainer’s choreography, which rejected the emotion of Martha Graham’s dance just as the visual artists were disenchanted with the drama of Abstract Expressionism. As Robert Mattison states in his essay, “all four opted instead for clear compositions that occupy their own space.”
A fully illustrated catalogue with essay by Robert S. Mattison will be published during the exhibition.