On View: Tworkov at David Klein Gallery, Birmingham

Birmingham, Michigan-The David Klein Gallery is pleased to announcean exhibition of drawings from the early 1970s by Jack Tworkov.  An opening reception will take place on Saturday, February 8 from 2:00 to 5:00 pm. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Steel Stillman. The exhibition continues March 8.

Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) was born in Poland and immigrated to the United States at the age of 13. He had early aspirations of becoming a writer but after seeing an exhibition of paintings by Cézanne and Matisse for the first time, he decided to study art. He participated in the WPA where he befriended many artists that would later become the most influential in Post-World War II America. By the late 1940s Tworkov was named “one of the most masterful artists of his generation” by the critic Thomas B. Hess. His gestural paintings of the 1950’s along with Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline formed the basis for the abstract expressionist movement in the United States.

In the second half of the 1960s, Jack Tworkov changed course and adopted a more systematic approach to his work. No longer would his paintings be improvised, instead each painting would begin with a plan, a geometrical blueprint worked out in advance. There were two important consequences of this shift: the first was that drawing, became crucial to his painting practice, the second is that geometry itself became, for the rest of his life, his art’s predominant subject matter.  This geometrical turn in Tworkov’s post-1965 work is clearly displayed in his early 1970s charcoal drawings. For him, in the 1970s, the relationship between geometry and gesture was everything – a marriage of thinking and doing, of reason and spontaneous impulse.

“For all that Tworkov had moved away from Abstract Expressionism, he remained a consummate modernist: in these pieces, beside geometry itself, his subjects were the grisalille absence of color, the materiality of charcoal and paper, and above all, gesture.”

— Steel Sillman from his essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition”

"For all that Tworkov had moved away from Abstract Expressionism," Steel Sillman writes in his essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, "he remained a consummate modernist: in these pieces, beside geometry itself, his subjects were the grisalille absence of color, the materiality of charcoal and paper, and above all, gesture."

Jack Tworkov was a founding member of the New York School and his work is in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Detroit Institute of Art to name a few. Solo exhibition of Tworkov’s work have been mounted by the Baltimore Museum of Art (’48), the Walker Art Center (’57), The Whitney Museum of American Art (’64, ’71), the Toledo Museum of Art (’71), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (’82), the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (2010), and most recently The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (2011).

>>Click here to view works in the exhibition<<

>> Click here to purchase an exhibition catalogue <<

For further information please contact: Christine Schefman, Director David Klein Gallery 163 Townsend, Birmingham, MI 48009 248-433-3700 / Christine@dkgallery.com Hours:  11:00 – 5:30, Monday – Saturday www.dkgallery.com