Hervé Bize is pleased to announce its forthcoming participation in Independent 20th Century.
The gallery will be exhibiting selected works by Jack Youngerman (1926-2020), who has been active in American and European art for over seven decades.
Jack Youngerman’s painting practice was built on the legacy of the Art concret movement, that is to say, prepared or predetermined from sketches or drawings, then executed at the desired scale. Along with other artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and François Morellet, with whom he was friends, Jack Youngerman contributed greatly to redefining the field of abstraction in art through a refined formal language and a precisely orchestrated attention to color, in accordance with numerous influences coming from his experiences, travels and stays, particularly the seminal years he spent in France (1947-1956).
Hervé Bize, having collaborated with the artist from 2013 to 2020, wishes to pay him tribute with this monographic project. This is not the first time the gallery has presented a work by the artist at Independent New York since in 2020 we included in the fair’s edition a 1961 seminal work that we rediscovered earlier in the basement of a major insurance company’s collection.
For this presentation at Independent 20th Century, we have chosen to focus solely on works from the 1950s and 1960s (paintings and works on paper), that is, pieces executed by Youngerman during his stay in France or shortly after his return to the United States. This focus is in keeping with recent museum exhibitions in France and as a prelude to the exhibition Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962, which will open the new Grey Art Gallery space in New York next February.
Jack Youngerman was born on March 25, 1926, in St. Louis, Missouri and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. After college and aided by the G.I. Bill, he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1947 to 1949. Early on in Paris, Youngerman met other artists including Ellsworth Kelly and François Morellet, visiting with Kelly to the studios of Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi. At the urging of the art dealer Betty Parsons, in 1956 Youngerman returned to America, settling at Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan. In 1959, Youngerman was included in the mythical MoMA show, 16 Americans. Since his first solo show at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris (1951), Youngerman has had more than sixty solo exhibitions, and was the subject of a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1986. He lived in New York until 1996, and from that time resided on Long Island. He died in February 2020 in Stony Brook. Youngerman’s work has been acquired by institutions including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; Phillips Collection, Washington; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Menil Collection, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis ; MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Center, New Haven; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia ; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy, France.
For further information or press inquiries, please contact the gallery.
Jack Youngerman, Black/Orange/Red/Orange, 1963, Oil on canvas, 18 x 18 in. (45,7 x 45,7 cm), Courtesy Jack Youngerman Archive and Galerie Hervé Bize.