Edward Avedisian: Retrospective
August 9, 2010 through September 19, 2010
Edward Avedisian: Retrospective
August 12 - September 19th
Reception Saturday, August 14th 6-8pm
Carrie Haddad rarely schedules a one person show, but an exception is made for this extraordinary artist who made his fame in NYC, but lived his last thirty years in Hudson, NY. This will be the first retrospective for Edward Avedisian since his death in 2007.
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.
The gallery has been working with Avedisian’s son, unrolling and unveiling canvases that were painted 40 years ago, but never seen by the public. On view will be 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”. In addition, the exhibit will include 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 20-25 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 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 insouciant 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.
And then, Avedisian moved to Hudson, into a large Federal house on lower Warren Street. There he created a new and very direct style of painting—figurative, naïve and narrative. His landscapes and other representational paintings are strangely sophisticated because of the abstract flatness, marvelous 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 paintings. 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.
Edward Avedisian: Retrospective runs from August 12th through September 19th.
A reception will take place on Saturday, August 14th from 6-8pm. The public is invited to attend.
