Kendal Shaw; A Journey Through Abstraction
This exhibition traces the trajectory of painter Kendall Shaw from his formative years exploring a graduate thesis on the human figure at Tulane University, his friendship with Mark Rothko, and his studies in New York with Ralston Crawford and Stuart Davis in the 1950s.
Shaw then went on to teach at Columbia University and the Brooklyn Museum School before becoming, with Miriam Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff, one of the founding members of the Pattern and Decoration movement in the 1970s.
After recovering from an extended illness, Shaw returned to abstraction in the 1990s with exhibitions in New Orleans and Cambridge, England. The late works in this exhibition chronicle his return to painting from the series LET THERE BE LIGHT and his last series of multiple-panel color field paintings that echo his early abstract works in New York from the early 1960s.
Kendal Shaw; Paintings in Shadow
This exhibition brings together Kendall Shaw’s silhouette paintings of sports and cultural figures from the early 1960s.
After a series of minimal abstract works, Shaw returned to working with the human figure inspired by newspaper and magazine photographs of well-known contemporary figures.
Having just returned to New York City from his native New Orleans, Shaw was one of the many artists who merged high and low in the moment that the emergent Pop Art movement was gaining momentum. Shaw’s work, more concerned with movement and proportion, parallels, rather than imitates, the works of his Pop contemporaries.
The paintings range from small works of unusual perspective to single figures and multiple-panel group compositions and are still startlingly fresh works of art today.