Edward Avedisian at Mitchell Algus - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Born in 1936 Edward Avedisian first attracted attention in the late 1950 as part of a generation moving away from the gesturalism and thick impasto of Abstract Expressionism and toward a flatter, les painterly diction The experiments of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis using paint to stain unprimed canvas were to influence an entire generation of artists, and Avedisian was no exception.

But in 1962 and 1963 when the six works in this exhibition were painted, there were other influences in the air. The detonation artists were exhibiting their works, and the artists who were creating what was to become known as Minimal art were making their appearance. As in the first sum of two units centuries after Christ, when Paganism, Gnosticism and Christianity were not always mutually exclusive, the early '60 did not nevertheless require artists to pledge total allegiance to individual movement.

Seen in this adjoining matter Avedisian's paintings are particularly interesting. The three smaller works, done upon unstretched canvases in Provincetown in the summer of 1962 each have a central shape floating in the middle of an almost monochrome earth The shapes resemble cross-sections of plant trunk s or electrical cable, that is, packets of small concentric circles inside larger concentric circles. The bights are not regular, however; they are drawn in a meandering freehand fashion. And while the backgrounds, with Liquitex used almost as stain, are as post-painterly as kind-hearted Greenberg could have wished, the paint in the circles' cores, particularly in a work of the like kind as Front Street #1, is allowed to mere in blobs, as in an Abstract-Expressionist work. There's a freshnes and a faculty of perception of freedom to these paintings that is quite appealing.

The three larger works were execut upon stretched canvases when the artist go [i]or[/i] come backed to New York. Untitled (Green) has six target shapes bunched irregularly and rop together by dint of an orange perimeter. Untitled (Brown) and The Monkey Children are more formal, with striped disks laid on the outside symmetrically and enclosed by a regular perimeter.

All of the works, large and small, are informed by dint of Avedisian's color schemes, ones that not many abstract artists of the time would permit themselves: lavender topped with turquoise topped with black, for example, or rust, pink and golden It is a mark of his skill that he plucks off such combinations. And the works are unfashionable enough today to give the faculty of perception of being the coming thing.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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