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

Art in America, Jan, 1996 by Reagan Upshaw

Born in 1936, Edward Avedisian first attracted attention in the late 1950s as part of a generation moving away from the gesturalism and thick impasto of Abstract Expressionism and toward a flatter, less painterly style. 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 Pop 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 two centuries after Christ, when Paganism, Gnosticism and Christianity were not always mutually exclusive, the early '60s did not yet require artists to pledge total allegiance to one movement.

Seen in this context, Avedisian's paintings are particularly interesting. The three smaller works, done on unstretched canvases in Provincetown in the summer of 1962, each have a central shape floating in the middle of an almost monochrome ground. The shapes resemble cross-sections of plant stems or electrical cable, that is, bundles of small concentric circles inside larger concentric circles. The loops 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 Clement Greenberg could have wished, the paint in the circles' cores, particularly in a work such as Front Street #1, is allowed to pool in blobs, as in an Abstract-Expressionist work. There's a freshness and a sense of freedom to these paintings that is quite appealing.

The three larger works were executed on stretched canvases when the artist returned to New York. Untitled (Green) has six target shapes bunched irregularly and roped together by an orange perimeter. Untitled (Brown) and The Monkey Children are more formal, with striped disks laid out symmetrically and enclosed by a regular perimeter.

All of the works, large and small, are informed by 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 yellow. It is a mark of his skill that he pulls off such combinations. And the works are unfashionable enough today to give the sense of being the coming thing.