#URBANJUICED 

Check out the early mid-century abstraction work of,

ALFRED LESLIE 

Artist 

b 1927-2023

Alfred's early works were a beautiful exploration into abstraction. This post is a celebration of that time. Perhaps his best work*

Cheers,

E. L.

 

ABOUT

Alfred Leslie

1927-2023

Alfred Leslie’s long career as an artist, writer and filmmaker defies neat categorization. He rose to prominence as a second generation Abstract Expressionist, with a uniquely layered and geometric approach to painting and collage. In the 1960s, however, Leslie abandoned abstraction entirely to focus on realism. His pioneering confrontational style of portraiture has made him a key figure in the return to figural representation in American art.  Leslie was born in the Bronx in 1927. After serving in World War II, Leslie studied art at New York University and later attended both the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League. He began exhibiting in 1947 and quickly became a fixture of the New York art scene, participating in the historic 9th Street Exhibition of 1951 and debuting his first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in 1952. A consummate multi-disciplinarian, Leslie also gained renown for his avant-garde films, including his groundbreaking 1959 collaboration with Robert Frank, Pull My Daisy. The following year, Leslie published The Hasty Papers, a single-issue magazine featuring the writings of Jean Paul Sartre, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, among others. In 1962, Leslie’s interests abruptly shifted toward realism and figuration, and he embarked on a series of monumental paintings in grisaille. A fire in 1966 destroyed nearly all of these monochrome paintings and halted a planned mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Shortly thereafter, Leslie began to introduce color into his work, although he continued painting his larger-than-life grisailles well into the 1990s. His latest series, “Pixel Scores”, is made with Photoshop.  Leslie currently lives and works in New York. His work is housed in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Art Institute of Chicago. Pull My Daisy was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1996. He is also the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Guggenheim Foundation Grant, an Artist Foundation Grant and a Medal of Merit from the American Institute of Arts and Letters.  

You just saw the SUPERDUPER GRIT-TASTIC ABSTRACT WORKS OF 

ALFRED LESLIE

(AKA: ALFRED LIPPITZ ) >We love his real name!

Special thanks to the Alan Stone project & Art Forum

#RAWCANVASPUNCH 

Check out the vivid power of,

MATT CONNERS 

Artist 

b 1973 

ABOUT:

Matt Connors (b. 1973, Chicago) lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. He's a painter who creates impactful visual compositions, with a sustained interest in form and colour. His work draws upon the history of painting and processes, particularly minimalism and abstraction, but is also influenced by design, poetry, writing and music. While his visual vocabulary is often borrowed from the modernist canon—colours, gestures, grids, framing devices and other geometric compositions—Connors’ approach is resolutely contemporary in both method and conception. In terms of colouration, his work triggers intuitive responses through complex and playful palettes. The viewer cannot resolve Connors’ compositional riddles through traditional formalist discourses—his work opens up a range of intellectual questions concerning mimesis, iteration and simulacra. Connors often works in series of interlinked, yet wholly autonomous works, in which a dialogue is established between repetition and variations in colours and form. Although his paintings might appear to depict something ‘real’—a familiar work of art for example—there is, in fact, no ‘original’. Taken to the logical conclusion, Connors’ paintings could be viewed as having superseded the reality upon which they are based. Matt Connors is also active in publishing artist books and other titles.

 He was included in the 2022 edition of the Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It's Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other institutional exhibitions include: Lismore Castle, Waterford, Ireland (2022); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2015); MoMA, New York (2014) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2012), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (2011). In 2015, Matt Connors was a resident at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. In 2012, he published the award-winning book A Bell is a Cup.

Matt's studio & pup.

You just the #JACKEDUP paintings of MATT CONNERS.