Avedisian: Abstract Paintings
Backroom Salon: Laura Von Rosk, David Konigsberg, Darshan Russell, James O'Shea
July 12, 2012 through August 12, 2012
Carrie Haddad Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, “Avedisian: Paintings and Drawings”, featuring works by the late Edward Avedisian. The show is on view from July 12 through August 12, 2012. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 14, from 6-8pm. All are invited to attend.
Avedisian, the New York art world’s very own Wunderkind of the 60s and 70s, made his fame with his Kool-Aid paintings - large, elegantly bold fields of color abstraction. Works in this show will include these early Kool-Aid paintings, a series of poured thick acrylic paintings, small works on paper, and the later representational paintings done in Hudson, NY. Avedisian's work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Need we say more? This is a show worth seeing. For the past few years Carrie Haddad Gallery has been working with Avedisian’s son, unrolling and unveiling canvases that were painted 40 years ago, but never seen by the public. Abstract paintings from the 1960’s, described by Roberta Smith in The New York Times as “brilliantly colored, boldly composed canvases that combined Minimalism’s rigor, Pop’s exuberance and the saturated tones of Color Field painting” will join several of Avedisian’s thick, poured and splattered abstract works of the 1970’s and 80’s. The gallery is most proud to include many of Avedisian's representational paintings which he made in Hudson during the last 30 years of his life. Edward Avedisian was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1936 and studied art at the BostonMuseumSchool. By the late 1950s he was living in New York City, part of a generation of promising young painters that included Frank Stella, Larry Poons and Darby Bannard. In the 1960’s, Edward Avedisian was one of the youngest of those luminaries producing a grand new breed of abstract painting. Shown first at Ivan Karp and Dick Bellamy’s Hansa Gallery, as well as Tibor deNagy, and then at Robert Elkon, Avedisian’s mix of pop playfulness, color field cool and high formalist style put his art in a unique, and at the time generously rewarded, position. One of his paintings was featured on the cover of Artforum, in 1969, and his work was included in the 1965 Op Art The Responsive Eye exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and in five annuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His paintings were widely sought after by collectors and acquired by major museums from New York to California. In 1977, Avedisian moved to Hudson and into a large Federal house on lower Warren Street. There he evolved and developed a new and very direct style of painting – one which continued to utilize his existing color field techniques yet towards works of a more narrative and figurative nature. His landscapes and other representational paintings are fantastically sophisticated with their abstract flatness, striking tonal palette, lyrical composition, and seemingly banal imagery of houses and sky, men with their trucks, oblique views of backyards and farms, and a few cats - Marvelous. But, now it was the 70’s and he was in Hudson, NY, not Manhattan, and the clamor for exhibits in NYC slowed to a halt. He never stopped painting, though, and sold well to a growing number of admirers.In the backroom of the gallery there will be a salon of gallery artists including landscapes by Laura Von Rosk, cityscapes by Darshan Russell, and works on paper by James O'Shea.
