Malin Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by the late Oakland-based artist Arthur Monroe. On view from February 18 – April 10, 2021, the exhibition includes nine large-scale paintings drawn from a three-decade span from 1980 to 2011.
Born in Harlem in 1935, Monroe emerged as a member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. He was particularly close to Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. After training at the Brooklyn Museum School and the Art Students League, Monroe studied for an extended period in the studio of Hans Hoffman, who took particular interest in Monroe as an African American abstract painter. Monroe was also deeply enmeshed in the mid-century jazz scene, where his circle of intimates included Charlie Parker, Max Roach and Thelonius Monk.
While continuing to expand upon the visual idiom of Abstract Expressionism, Monroe developed a singular process that was highly considered – almost empirical. Every painting began as a rectilinear grid, which Monroe used as a register to formulate the color palette for his work. Stretching back his tutelage under Hans Hoffman, Monroe’s approach to painting began as an inquiry into the relationships between a set of colors. Over long periods, line and form would emerge in a discursive, iterative process.
Although Monroe intended each work to establish a visual context within which viewers could have their own contingent experiences, he also encoded a lifetime of his artistic experience and inquiry within the successive layers of paint – an animating quality which his friend Charles Lloyd characterized as a “surpassing knowingness.”
In his later years, Monroe showed extensively with key contemporaries from the Bay Area, including Robert Colescott, Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Mike Henderson and Raymond Saunders. The Ancestors Are Humming is the artist’s first exhibit in New York since 1966.