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Paul Jenkins Three Decades: Works from the 1960s, 1970s and 2000s Ronchini Gallery solo exhibition at Expo Chicago 19-22 September 2019

Curated in collaboration with the Estate of the artist, this group of works shows the breadth and depth of Paul Jenkins’ artistic expression in a solo exhibition featuring works of the 1960s evidencing what the artist called his “lost and found line”; a key 1973 large-scale monochrome; and late works from the oughts. Paul Jenkins (1923-2012), known for his method of pouring paint onto primed canvas and the luminous color of his abstractions, was a contemporary of Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell.

Phenomena Blue Yonder, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 76.75 x 103.50 inches /194.9 x 262.9 cm ©2019 Estate of Paul Jenkins

A crucial piece in the booth is a large-scale painting from 1973, Phenomena Blue Yonder, part of a little known aspect of the artist’s work in monochrome which recurred intermittently throughout his career. This painting, which has not been shown for decades, has distinct affinities with the artist’s first large-scale monochrome, Phenomena Big Blue (1960-61), now in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in . Jenkins’ emphasis on blue may find its antecedents in works by Toulouse-Lautrec, which he saw in the Lautrec museum in Albi in 1959 on his return to from Spain. In his monograph on the artist, the distinguished art historian Albert E. Elsen quotes Jenkins’ specific observations:

I could not help but notice many of Lautrec’s incomplete works. Lautrec employed blue, blue lines, blue masses as a beginning in many paintings. With some artists this was a very traditional way to begin. But it later struck me as being like a springboard to move into acrylics.

The artist’s extreme control of his poured paint is evidenced in the diagonal forms and their defined edges as well as in the vertical column serving to anchor the whole, and flowing out into a diaphanous pillar of blue. In addition to guiding the flow of paint with the ivory knife, the artist would, as he stated: “pour a line from the brush and fuse and work with the ivory knife.” The primed white canvas serves to hold and focus the asymetrical composition as is also evident in a related painting with monochromatic tendencies, Phenomena Kwan Yin 1969, currently in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Monochrome works by the artist are also found in the collections of: UB Anderson Gallery, State University of New York at Buffalo; the , New York; the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, California; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; and , Paris.

Two 1960s paintings on view reveal an essential component to Jenkins’ work: his concept of what he calls the “lost and found line.” In a mid-1950s entry in the artist’s journal about the white enamel he was using at the time, Jenkins writes: “The line can be made to seem to appear, it emerges rather than looks like the direct calligraphic stroke.” The artist continued to evolve this concept after his transition to acrylic paint in 1960.

Phenomena Listen Listen (1968 diptych), is a tangle of sinuous bands of various colors, thickness and shapes in a dramatic dialogue with the painting’s major forms. These lines appear and disappear throughout the composition in a tumultuous voyage across the canvas. They seem to both emerge from the major forms and at the same time melt into them in a joyous exuberance of primary color.

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Phenomena Nightwood (1962) conveys a powerful monumentality through its weighted central form. Restrained linear traces, which soon become more prevalent and pronounced in later paintings, are nonetheless present. This work evokes a sense of stillness not dissimilar to the archaic standing stones that the artist was drawn to in Stonehenge and Avebury.

In Phenomena Seville Procession (1974), the emphasis is on granular vertical veils of analogous reds in varying densities. Elsen writes that the “granular veils which recur after 1960 evolved not only to give a new sense of substance, but also to introduce another kind of light, a reflecting or incandescent light.” Elsen goes on to relate the recurrence of strong emotional color such as the reds to the brilliant dyes worn by people in India observed by the artist during his stay in 1964, and to the Andrei Rublev icons he saw during his trip to Russia in 1967. Jenkins states that the Russian experience was like “rediscovering red.”

The lateral thrusts in Phenomena Blue Yonder find their equivalent in the works from the year 2000. In Phenomena Edge of Sound (2006), tension is created through the convergence of veils coming from different directions in the painting and emphasized by the tactility of the impasto incursions. This presence of impasto, first seen in the artist’s mid-1950s oil paintings, recurred in 1979 and then began to integrate in varying densities with the poured veils.

Poet and writer Jonathan Goodman, succinctly describes Jenkins: ...he at once belongs and remains an explorer for his generation, being a meditative painter whose pure abstractions, especially from the middle and late periods, put forth a belief in the idealized relations between the artist and visual appearances. ______Albert E. Elsen. Paul Jenkins. Harry N. Abrams, Inc.: New York, 1973. Jonathan Goodman. Thresholds of Color. Robert Miller: New York, 2014.

About the artist Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1923, Paul Jenkins settled in New York in 1948, studying for four years with at the Art Students League on his GI Bill. His first solo exhibitions were at Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris in 1954; in 1955 at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery, Seattle; in 1956 at the Martha Jackson Gallery, in New York and, in 1960, at Arthur Tooth & Sons, London. Invited by Jiro Yoshihara in 1958, Jenkins worked with Gutai in Osaka in 1964, exchanging works with several artists. Those paintings formed the basis of the exhibition “Under Each Other’s Spell”: Gutai and New York first shown at the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center in East Hampton in 2009.

Selected recent exhibitions include: Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019); Painting for Performance, McNay Museum of Art, San Antonio (2019); Echoing Forms: American Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and : A Social Revolution, Tampa Museum of Art (2019); By Any Means: Contemporary Drawings from the Morgan, Morgan Library & Museum, New York (2019); Lost, Loose and Loved, Foreign Artists in Paris 1944-1968, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofía, Madrid (2018); Intuition, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice (2017); Gravity’s Edge, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2014); Rothko to Richter: Mark Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell, Princeton University Art Museum (2014).

Selected recent solo exhibitions include: Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, UK (2016); Chapel of Meditation, UB Anderson Gallery, State University of New York at Buffalo (2016); Spectrum of Light, Museo di Pittura Murale, Prato (2014); The Color of Light, Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento (2011); Oeuvres Majeures, Palais des Beaux-Arts, (2005); Viaggio in Italia, Basilica Palladiana, Vicenza (2000).

Retrospectives include: the Musée Picasso, Antibes (1987); Houston Museum of Fine Arts and San Francisco Museum of Art (1971- 1972); and Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover (1964), amongst others.

Permanent museum collections include: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Tate Modern, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée Picasso, the Maeght Foundation, the Stedelijk Museum, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, and the National Museum of Western Art, , amongst many others.