For the 2016 ADAA: The Art Show, Galerie Lelong is pleased to present a solo exhibition of McArthur Binion’s paintings from the 1970s, many of which were shown in the inaugural Artists Space exhibition in 1973.
Over his fifty-year career, Chicago-based artist McArthur Binion has developed an innovative visual language that reimagines a Minimalist aesthetic and attitude. During the early 1970s, Binion forged an artistic path between abstraction and personal narrative, incorporating formal qualities of minimalism with highly textured surfaces. With each intense stroke of the oil paint stick and crayon along the surface of his canvas and aluminum supports, Binion physically inscribes his individual and unique self into his paintings, encouraging viewers to see the hand of the artist in his formalist compositions. Binion, along with other contemporary African American proponents of abstraction, expand historical notions of Minimalism by consciously incorporating the individual self in the process of creating as well as in the finished work.
On view will be a group of paintings in large and small scale that exemplify what the artist has called the alignment between his practice and “an intangible and performative approach to making art,” or a style of “action painting.” Binion’s technique of pressing oil paint stick and crayon into the surfaces of his works are a subtle reference to the repetitive manual labor of his youth, yet also an emphatic assertion of the hand’s importance in painting. This, along with the insertion of personal narrative, distinguishes his work from more reductive Minimalist practices.
While a young artist in the 1970s, Binion crafted paintings that are elegant, mature, and precisely executed. They contain antecedents that Binion has continued to employ throughout his career as an artist, such as allusions to landscape, history of the rural American South, and an embrace of a restrained palette.
Born in Mississippi in 1946, Binion lived in New York in the 1970s and was loosely part of a group of African American painters who, despite the pressures to make artwork that was politically motivated, devoted themselves to abstraction. In 2012, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, hosted a solo show of Binion’s work, and he has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Prospect.3, New Orleans, in 2014. Binion’s work is held in multiple museum collections including the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Detroit Institute of Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Phillips Collection. Binion taught as a professor of art at Columbia College in Chicago from 1992 through 2015. Galerie Lelong presented Binion’s first solo exhibition in New York in two decades in September 2015. In conjunction with the exhibition, Black Dog published the catalogue McArthur Binion: ReMine with essays by Franklin Sirmans and Lowery Stokes Sims.