Jack Youngerman (b.1926) belongs to the first generation of artists who set up studios in New York City’s abandoned industrial spaces during the 1950s and 1960s. Coenties Slip, the old seaport at the lower tip of Manhattan, provided artists with cheap, spacious lofts, as well as distance (ideological and physical) from the preceding generation of Abstract Expressionists encamped uptown. This group included painters, sculptors, designers, poets, filmmakers, and performers; among them: Chryssa, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney, and James Rosenquist with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns occupying studios nearby. Not an art movement per se, the neighborhood provided a setting where the free exchange of ideas flourished. Each forged their own intellectual path, loosely connected by a shared conversation and a common landscape suspended between the city and the sea. Nevertheless, this group of artists, with Youngerman among them, formed a bridge between the gestural painting of the 1940s, and the Minimalism and Pop Art of the 1960s.

Youngerman was born in Saint Louis, Missouri and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He first studied art while attending the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill supported by a grant from the U.S. Navy. With help from the G.I. Bill, Youngerman attended the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and remained there to paint until 1955. It was there that he met Ellsworth Kelly and married the actress Delphine Seyrig. During this period, he began to experiment with hard-edge, geometric abstraction and other ideas which would form the foundation for later work. He returned to the United States in 1956, joining his friend Kelly at Coenties Slip the following year.

During those years, Youngerman greatly expanded the scale of his paintings, developing softer, more organic forms, an interest in color optics, and a sense of space in which shapes fluctuate between positive and negative. All of these elements can been seen in his later Blue Brown Suite, a portfolio produced in 1978.

FEB 8    Join us for a reception to celebrate the launch of the 2018 Spring Exhibitions, LUAG Main Gallery, Zoellner Arts Center, 6-8PM. Free and open to the public. Refreshments.