Ronald Bladen |
Press Release |
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Paintings from the Fifties
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We are pleased to announce our first exhibition of work by Ronald Bladen, whose estate is now exclusively represented by Danese. This exhibition of early paintings opens on Friday, October 29 and continues through Saturday, November 27, 2004. An acknowledged pioneer of “minimalism,” Ronald Bladen was one of three artists, along with Barnett Newman and Tony Smith, to participate in the groundbreaking 1967 exhibition Scale as Content, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Included in that exhibition was Bladen’s now legendary and monumental sculpture entitled X. Among other seminal works produced by the artist during that period were Three Elements, Cathedral Evening and Curve. During the 1950’s and prior to his development as a sculptor, Bladen created a number of paintings that in manner and form were directly related to the work of the Abstract Expressionists. Yet, “never one to measure progress through his past accomplishments, Bladen tended to relegate earlier work to the closet, so to speak, if it no longer seemed relevant…. The fact that he later hid many of [these] paintings in his studio made their subsequent discovery after his death all the more poignant.”1 Bladen’s paintings from the fifties demonstrate many of the qualities normally associated with Abstract Expressionism – “luxuriant, tarry surfaces spread like butter, suggesting a Clyfford Still disciple gone wild.”2 Bladen “took as his subject matter the energy and radiance found in nature,” and his paintings, many of which hint at landscape, are darkly reminiscent of Soutine, Ryder and Blakelock. “With their gritty concretions protruding – sometimes as much as four inches – amid stucco or frothlike expanses,”3 these works carry a sublime and transcendental power. The paintings are strikingly different from the cool, reductivist sculpture to follow, but there does exist a “spiritual continuity” throughout Bladen’s artistic production. “However minimalist his [later work] may appear, it is animated by the soul of an Abstract Expressionist.”4 Ronald Bladen was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1918 and studied at the California School of Fine Arts from 1939-43. He moved to New York in 1955 and in 1957 became a founding member of the Brata Gallery cooperative on Tenth Street, where an exhibition of his paintings was held in 1958. He received critical praise for his sculpture in the exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum (1966) as well as in the aforementioned Scale as Content. Bladen continued to regularly exhibit his work over the next two decades, while teaching intermittently at the Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Since his death in 1988, Bladen’s work has been presented in one-man exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, The University of North Carolina, Greensboro; the Selby Gallery at the Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota; and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. |
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| 1 Dreishpoon, Douglas. “Making the Inside
the Outside,” Ronald Bladen: Drawings and Sculptural Models,
Weatherspoon Art Gallery, The University of North Carolina at
Greensboro, 1995, pp. 19-39. 2 Meyer, James. “Ronald Bladen…,” ARTforum, May 1999, p. 174 3 Berkson, Bill. “Introduction,” Ronald Bladen: Early and Late, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1991, p. 6. 4 Johson, Ken. “A Romantic Pushes Minimalism to the Maximum,” The New York Times, Friday, February 19,1999. |
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