Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to present a comprehensive exhibition of paintings by Norman Bluhm from the mid-1960s to the mid 1970s. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essay by John Yau.
By the late 1960s Bluhm was confidently defining complex spatial relationships substantially different from the ones synonymous with the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, with whom he has often been linked. It is literally when he moved on from his own Abstract Expressionist background and entered a territory all his own – an alternative world. Whereas de Kooning set his women within a shallow, post-cubist space and Kline stabilized his “painted space,” as he called it, on the canvas surface, Bluhm used a hothouse palette of light and dark colors – mostly reds, pinks, peaches, blues, and lavenders, along with black and white, and almost no green – to evoke depthless spaces for his rounded, layered, entwined, interpenetrating forms and rubbery shapes to float within, open onto, and press against. It is a world undergoing constant change while in continual motion...
John Yau