Preview (invitation only)
Thursday, February 29, 10AM–7PM

Public Days
Friday, March 1, 11AM–7PM
Saturday, March 2, 11AM–7PM
Sunday, March 3, 11AM–6PM

Visit Michael Rosenfeld Gallery at Booth A16

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to return to Frieze LA with an exhibition of major paintings and works on paper by Beauford Delaney, Norman Lewis, and Alma Thomas. Of the same generation and active in Paris, New York, and Washington, DC, respectively, these painters pioneered some of the most advanced approaches to abstraction of the twentieth century. Works on view at Booth A16 will focus on the most productive decades of the artists’ careers—the 1950s through the 1970s—presenting an illuminating survey of an unparalleled era in American painting.

Like their abstract expressionist contemporaries, Delaney, Lewis, and Thomas privileged the individual painterly gesture as a means to conveying an essential truth, each forging visionary approaches to non-objective painting predicated upon the authenticity of the brushstroke. All three artists were resolute in their commitment to abstraction throughout their careers despite inadequate critical and institutional attention as well as pressure from certain circles within their own community to create representational images that directly addressed the Black experience. As art historian Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims writes, these artists’ approaches to painting were grounded in their distinct but intersecting theories of abstraction: “For Delaney, abstraction’s significance came through in the healing properties of color; for Lewis, abstraction articulated the interaction of art and social events; and for Thomas, its critical aspect consisted of post-Post-Impressionist chromatic evocations of time, place, sensibility and mood.”[1]

Born and raised in Knoxville, TN, Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) cultivated a vivid, expressionist style of semi-representational painting during his twenty-three years in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where he settled in 1930. His turn to abstraction occurred shortly after he followed his dear friend James Baldwin to Paris in September of 1953—a pivotal moment in his life and work. Though he continued to create portraits for the rest of his career, Delaney’s primary output soon evolved into purely non-objective expressions of light and color, wherein gestural brushstrokes constitute both form and subject.

Booth A16 presents an exemplary selection of Delaney’s abstract works on canvas and paper including a large-scale painting of exceptional quality, Untitled (Waning Light: Abstraction) (1963). Demonstrative of the complexity of Delaney’s impastoed surfaces, this work is dominated by lyrical scumbles of bright yellow that swirl across a multicolored ground, constituting a wholly abstract exploration of the flickering light of early evening. Yellow was a particularly important color for Delaney, holding connotations of a spiritual, illuminatory radiance, and his yellow abstractions are widely admired as embodiments of exaltation, ecstasy, and rapture. As Baldwin once wrote, “When we stand in front of a Delaney painting, we are, my friends, in the light: and if in that light, which is both loving and merciless, we can confront each other, we are liberated by the perception that darkness is not the absence of light, but its denial.”[2]

Following a similar artistic trajectory, Norman Lewis (1909–1979) began his career in the 1930s as a social realist painter but eventually became disillusioned with art’s capacity to inspire social and political change. He began experimenting with abstraction in the 1940s, producing semi-representational cubist works before arriving at his mature, fully abstract style by the end of the decade. Born and raised in Harlem, Lewis lived in New York his entire life, drawing inspiration from the city’s creative scenes and daily bustle. Throughout the 1950s he honed his approach to abstraction, which typically involved diffuse atmospheres of color and delicate, calligraphic linework. Music and activism were central to Lewis’ life, and he subtly addressed these and other interests throughout his oeuvre. Exemplary of this impulse is Untitled (Players Four) (1966), which captures the improvisational energy of a jazz quartet in action. Simultaneously suggesting musical notations, the movements of the musicians, and the visual embodiment of sound itself, Lewis’ painting palpably conveys a rhythmic, free-flowing harmony through purely abstract means.

Another of Lewis’ major achievements, Untitled (1978) is a standout example of Lewis’ final series of works known as the Seachange compositions. Comprising a central motif of ovoid forms radiating outward, this painting on paper suggests the undulating movement of the sea, light reflecting off the water, and the reverberating sound of wind and waves. In titling these works with a term for a prevailing shift in public perception, Lewis imbues them with a political overtone, referencing the changing plight of Black Americans following the political upheavals of the 1960s. Taken as a whole, Lewis’ works embody the artist’s eloquently stated understanding of art as “the expression of unconscious experiences common to all men… In this sense, it becomes an activity of discovery, emotional, intellectual, and technical, not only for the artist but for those who view his work.”[3]