Al Loving
1935-2005
Untitled (Abstract)
1984
Acrylic and elements of collage on handmade paper
34 x 31.25 inches
Signed and dated.

This work to be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonne dedicated to the artist.

Provenance: Collection of Julia E. Harris, Chicago, acquired directly from the artist.

Al Loving was born in Detroit. His father was the first black teacher in Detroit’s public high schools and Loving, Sr. went on to become a professor and dean at the University of Michigan.

Loving, Jr. studied first at Wayne State University and Flint Junior College (now Mott Community College), then the University of Illinois (BFA, 1963) and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MFA). Shortly after graduation, Loving moved to New York, and lived at the Hotel Chelsea (1968). He is the first African American artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1969).

Unlike many African-American artists whose art focused on the racial politics of the era, Loving was a staunch abstractionist. His early works were built upon strict yet simple geometric shapes—often hexagonal or cubic modules. Inspired by Hans Hoffmann (who taught Loving’s mentor Al Mullen), Loving concentrated on the tension between flatness and spatial illusionism. In the 1970s the artist became disenchanted with his earlier, hard-edge geometric paintings. Loving dispensed with notions of centralized composition, figure/ground separation, and pictorial frame in his later torn canvas and collaged paper works. He combined hundreds of pieces of cut and torn canvas or paper into an abundance of overlapping patterns and shapes, their rich and intuitive array of colors stretch irregularly, spiraling outward, surrounding the space, and engulfing the viewer. (REF: www.alloving.org)

In an interview in the catalogue for ‘The Appropriate Object’, an exhibition of seven black artists at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1989, Mr. Loving spoke about his difficulty with the cube and his need to break out of a geometrical prison.

In the early 1970s, Loving abandoned hard-edge abstraction, and began creating fabric collages in the abstract expressionist style. He was influenced by an exhibition at the Whitney, Abstract Designs in American Quilts, and began working with sewn material fragments, much like Sam Gilliam. A decade later, he transitioned into using other materials, such as corrugated board and rag paper, torn by hand and reconstructed into circles and spirals. Each piece of cardboard is painted and placed overlapping to create the dynamic and continued composition. About this time (1988), Loving joined the faculty of the City University of New York. Loving’s work is included in the Detroit Institute of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

generally very good condition; unframed. There has been a repair to a slight bend in the triangular-shaped point which protrudes from the main body of the work. There is a minor spot of inpaint at that point which is visible under UV inspection. This work was originally unframed and the artist typically mounted these directly to the wall "free-form", similarly to if one were hanging a quilt; however, it may also be mounted in a shadowbox frame and hung traditionally on the wall.