Al Held | Constructing Abstraction

David Klein Gallery is pleased to announce Al Held: Constructing Abstraction, an exhibition devoted to a pivotal decade in the career of renowned American painter Al Held (1928–2005). The presentation features eleven rarely exhibited marker drawings from the early 1970s alongside two monumental paintings from the artist’s celebrated Return to Color series of the early 1980s.

 

It is a testament to Held’s resourcefulness that he embraced markers as a serious medium for drawing. While the free-flowing ink of markers is often associated with looseness and informality, Held employed them with rigor and precision. Working with rulers, compasses, and stencils at his drafting table, he produced geometric abstractions that tested the effects of color on volumetric forms and spatial construction. Vivid hues—blue, green, red, orange, and yellow—were balanced with black, brown, and gray to embolden cubes, cylinders, and triangles with airy clarity. These drawings represent Held at the height of his powers, exploring a new medium while looking toward the future.

 

For more than a decade, beginning in 1967, Held devoted himself to his Black and White series, paintings of complex perspectival systems rendered without color. The marker drawings, produced concurrently, offered him an independent yet related field of experimentation. With their vibrant “tripartite lines” and complex spatial configurations, they anticipated Held’s dramatic reintroduction of color to painting at the end of the decade.

 

The exhibition culminates with two large-scale canvases—Trajan’s Court IV (1983) and Vorcex IV (1984)—that represent the next step in Held’s evolution. These works demonstrate his renewed embrace of color and illusionistic space, modeling architectonic forms with bold chromatic intensity and dramatic light and shadow.

Together, the drawings and paintings trace a crucial transition in Held’s oeuvre, underscoring his restless pursuit of formal innovation and his lasting influence on the language of abstraction.

 

About the Artist
Al Held (1928–2005) was a leading figure in postwar American abstraction, celebrated for his large-scale, spatially complex paintings. After rising to prominence in the 1960s with his hard-edged geometric canvases, Held spent much of the 1970s working extensively on paper before returning to painting in the 1980s with a renewed engagement in color and illusionistic space. His work has been exhibited widely and is included in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Art Institute of Chicago.