Author Description

"By the beginning of the '60s Al Held's signature painting style of short broad brush strokes had transformed into longer sure handed lines. The difference was particularly evident in his ink drawings from that time. Stephen Westfall's comments in connection with these works puts them into a broader context; "We're so accustomed to thinking of Held as a late master of the tape roll that the freehand elegance of these drawings comes as a surprise. It helps to remember that Held was really one of the last great Abstract Expressionists up until his shift to hard-edged painting. The transformation of the formal apprehension of the elasticity of pictorial scale into poetic content was probably the great shared drama of the Abstract Expressionists and Held is a master of this operation." Held: Concrete Abstraction will offer an opportunity to see several works on paper done in ink and brush along with a selection of canvases from this period."--Text from the gallery website (see link).