Jack Tworkov

Jack Tworkov enjoyed an exceptionally long and productive career. A charter member of the New York School, he first made his reputation as an Abstract Expressionist painter in the ’50s. In the mid-’60s, however, he turned away from the subjective, emotional bias implicit in Abstract Expressionism in favor of a clear-cut structural approach that he continued to develop until his death last year at the age of 82. The work in this show, dating from 1978 to 1982, reveals the power, persuasiveness, and pictorial probity of Tworkov’s late vision.

Tworkov’s obvious fascination with perspectival play and planar illusionism is evident throughout. These pictures seem to sound a purist message involving the artist’s desire to determine space, discern form, and thereby, combining logic and inspiration, to create distinctive images of harmonious order. The care with which Tworkov built his structures can be seen in the “Alternative Series” and the “Indian Red Series,” both represented here. The sharp-edged, allover, linear, skeinlike structure tentatively stated in Alternative VII and Alternative VIII, two paintings from 1978, is put to expressive use in Indian Red Series #1, 1979, in which Tworkov brings together line, color, and plane with finesse and impact. In the “Indian Red Series” as a whole Tworkov shows various-sized and -shaped quadrilaterals and triangles from a diagonal perspective; these seem in the process both of being and becoming, as the planes and planar sectors, colored Indian red, blue, and gray, appear to twist, turn, tip, and fold on point. This movement, as the planes seem to flicker or vibrate behind and in front of each other, emerges as the dominant sensation in The Exes and The Ens, both 1980, which, as their titles suggest, invite the viewer to make out the shapes of letters which inspired their complex structures. Another alphabet letter, “W,” is integrated into the structure of Diptych for Wally, 1982, Tworkov’s last monumental painting, which measures 90 by 150 inches. Here the “W” spreads itself across a surface consisting of alternating gray, green, and earth-orange red vertical planes that have been texturally painted to contain smaller such planes, which emerge at a distant view. Observations of formal qualities, however, give way to the overwhelming lyrical qualities that emanate from the luminous surfaces.

—Ronny Cohen