Jack Rasmussen and David Eichholtz gallery discussion on Willem de Looper exhibition - part3

David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Color Field Paintings from the 1960s and 1970s: Aesthetic Transitions Through Process, Willem de Looper’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in New York City since 1988. The presentation of 13 paintings from 1968 to 1976 covers a seminal period in the artist's career. De Looper (1932, The Hague, Netherlands – 2009, Washington, D.C.) maintained his focus on formal concerns using a process driven approach that yielded numerous color-based abstractions during these decades. The big shift during this period was his moving away from pouring and physically rolling and manipulating the paint on the canvas surface to bringing brushes and rollers into the process to guide the location, but not always the flow and final placement of the acrylic paint. Thus, the compositions transitioned from amorphous, billowy and free-flowing using mostly gravity and chance to drive his compositions to decidedly creating striated bands of color, often unbounded and melding from one to the other. The continued application of multiple thin layers of pigment and allowing underlayers and residue of previous passages to remain and peak through upper layers maintained a level of chance and surprise that was just as challenging to control and fresh to the artist as the tilting of the canvases and rolling the pigment in an attempt to guide the outcome.