Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Alvin Loving
American (b. 1935)
LISA (1971)
acrylic on canvas
63” x 62.5”
SUSAN (1971)
63” x 62.5”

STYLE: ABSTRACTION

  

Al Loving was influenced by his father, a sign painter with artistic training, and started copying his portfolio at the age of twelve. Loving studied art at the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan and moved to New York in 1968. A year later he was given a solo show at the Whitney Museum. Both Loving’s style of work--geometric abstraction--and the fact that he was an African-American artist at a time when the Whitney was eager to redress earlier omissions were factors in this early recognition by a major institution.

The hexagonal forms of Lisa and Susan are typical of Loving’s work of the seventies. The artist painted the different sections in carefully modulated colors in order to create the illusion of projection and recession. Later in his career, the artist turned away from this hard-edged style to make collages with much looser, more expressive elements.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

William Zimmer, New York Times, 12/6/98
“Mr. Loving is an abstract painter whose early works show a great dedication to the formal thinking of the mid-1960's. These shaped canvases hint illusionistically at volume or three dimensions even though the surface is resolutely flat. "Cube" is painted as if it were the scaffolding for a solid form.”
Al Loving, artist statement, 1988
“But one thing that happens to you when you become a disciplined artist is that you don't make those kind of choices anymore. You become part of a process. Once it's been put inside you, once the process has become a part of you, then it has a mind of its own. That's when I discovered I was just a vehicle...I feel sometimes like I died years ago and art has just dragged me through life....I had one image that I had developed beyond the cube called a septahedron. I had a six-sided stretcher bar made and I stretched the painting over it...I was trying to use the wall as a canvas, joining these things together so I could compose on a wall as canvas. I could put as many of these things up as I'd need. That opened it up a little bit. I could move with it horizontally...But in the process of moving through formalism, you just do this art, embarrassed or not, because it's going to take you somewhere. But where it was going, I had no idea...there was a quilt show at the Whitney Museum...That's when I started dying fabric...Sam Gilliam had been draping stuff...I could move away from the wall a little bit and begin to play with these other options...Sam had given me the right to do this...I don't do painting. I do something else. I don't use brushes anymore, no matter what. I feel that any artist who paints from that tradition is an imposter...when I found my own roots, my own gravity, my own self, it wasn't about painting.”