David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Color Field Paintings from the 1960s and 1970s: Aesthetic Transitions Through Process, Willem de Looper’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in New York City since 1988. The presentation of 13 paintings from 1968 to 1976 covers a seminal and important period in de Looper’s career. De Looper (1932, The Hague, Netherlands – 2009, Washington, D.C.) steadfastly maintained his focus on formal concerns using a process driven approach that drove his creation of color-based abstractions during these decades. The big shift during this period was his moving away from pouring and physically rolling and manipulating the paint on the canvas surface to his decision to bring brushes and rollers into the process to guide the location, but not always the flow and final coverage of the acrylic paint. Thus, the compositions transitioned from amorphous, billowy and free-flowing using mostly gravity and chance to drive his compositions to decidedly creating striated, often unbounded and melding one to the other, bands of color. The continued application of multiple thin layers of pigment and allowing underlayers and residue of previous passages to remain and peak through upper layers maintained a level of chance and surprise that was as challenging to control and fresh to the artist as the tilting of the canvases and rolling the pigment in an attempt to guide the outcome.

Click here to read the entire press release