ED CLARK

‘The Big Sweep’ exhibition will be accompanied by the release of ‘Ed Clark: The Big Sweep; Chronicles of a Life,1926–2019,’ the definitive new book on Clark, produced by Hauser & Wirth Publishers.

Among the exceptional works on view, the earliest is ‘Untitled’ (1955). Completed while Clark was living in Paris,this canvas reflects the direction of the artist’s early practice under influences he encountered upon arriving inEurope in 1952, after studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. Here, he has created a work at once in dialogue withthe art of his contemporaries, while expressing a velocity discernably his own. In Paris, Clark surrounded himselfwith such luminary American peers as Beauford Delaney, Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell, while likewise findingprofound inspiration in the paintings of French artist Nicolas de Staël. Released from the bigotry and racializedassumptions that burdened Black artists in the United States, Clark felt liberated from the focus on realism thathad dominated his practice back home. He began to experiment with abstraction, and to lean into the centralrole gesture and the tangibility of paint could play in practice. Of this period, he said, ‘I began to believe, from myconversations with other artists, that the real truth is in the stroke. For me, it is large, bold strokes that do not referdistinctly to seen nature. The paint is the subject. The motions of the strokes give the work life.’

Clark returned to the United States in 1956 and quickly established himself in the New York School alongsideAl Held, Franz Kline, Yayoi Kusama and George Sugarman, among others. In 1957, he broke away from thelimitations of the traditional rectangular canvas and created the first shaped painting in American modernism,now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. By including protruding collage elements in his paintings,he immediately endowed his work with a bold, palpable physicality. In 1967, Clark spent a year living at JoanMitchell’s home and studio in Vétheuil, France, where he painted his first oval canvas, mimicking the shape ofthe human eye, and using a push broom to create large sweeping brushstrokes. The monumental ovoid canvasof ‘Untitled’ (c. 1970s)––on view in this exhibition––as well as the embedded oval shape of ‘Integrated Oval #1’(1972)—exhibited in the Whitney Annual that same year—both suggest the pleasure and sense of freedom Clarkachieved through the formal experimentation that in turn allowed him to intensify his gesture and the effects ofmateriality, form and color.

Clark would become renowned for his revolutionary use of a push broom as a paintbrush, a technique he firsttried in Paris in 1956 and that, along with the shaped canvas, would come to define his practice. The pushbroom offered the artist a way to imbue his work with dramatic degrees of dynamism and energy that could notbe realized by a conventional paintbrush. As demonstrated in such paintings as ‘Locomotion’ (1963) and ‘NorthLight (Paris)’ (1987), Clark’s method used the pressure of his entire body—he described the effect as being akinto ‘cutting through something really fast; that’s what the straight stroke with the push broom gives you, speed’—to evenly extend the momentum of his sweeping gesture across the whole surface of the canvas. Though Clarkwould occasionally vary the intensity of the line and color in a single motion, exploring nuances in its effects, thepower of this revolutionary approach opened new vistas for abstraction with a big sweep.

By the 1980s, Clark had morphed the linearity of his earlier paintings into more tubular motifs that curved andsplintered around the canvas. This ‘Broken Rainbow’ series is characterized by rounded brushstrokes that expandupon the curved lines of the 70s ovals with a new energy and confidence. Sometimes applying dry pigment toa wet broom, Clark injected his sweeping gestures with even greater motion and liveliness. In his late paintings,made in the first years of the 21st century, such as ‘Creation’ (2006), Clark’s forceful broom strokes gave way tosofter, at times even aqueous, gestures that expressed a final burst of pure liberation.

Released in conjunction with the exhibition, ‘Ed Clark: The Big Sweep; Chronicles of a Life, 1926–2019’ (Hauser& Wirth Publishers) chronicles the story of the artist’s life and work through reprints of important historical textsby numerous authors, including Darby English, Anita Feldman, Geoffrey Jacques, Kellie Jones, April Kingsley andCorinne Robins; interviews with Clark by Quincy Troupe, Jack Whitten and Judith Wilson; and photographs, lettersand ephemera from the archive of Clark’s estate and his papers at the Archives of American Art, SmithsonianInstitution, Washington, D.C.