Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of large-scale paintings from the 1970s by Norman Bluhm. The artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery will open on 28 July at 525 West 22nd Street and remain on view through 1 September 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Zachary Ritter.

In 1977, Jane Livingston, Chief Curator of The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., stated “Norman Bluhm is a painter who remains apart from the diversions of recent art history. While he continues in a post-Abstract Expressionist vein, he is tenaciously independent and he will not avoid difficult change in his work. Bluhm is distinguished from his peers in many ways, one of which is that he seems to have decided that for himself the mark - that exalted touch, or stroke—was not enough.”

Beginning in the 1970s, and after more than two decades of experimentation and accomplishment, Bluhm arrived at an idiom of gestural abstract painting entirely his own. “In the years immediately following his arrival in New York, Bluhm produced paintings that are rich with the movement of their making, but which also show a real sophistication of structure: angular bursts of color across the canvas work as anchor points for the eye as it tracks Bluhm’s brush,” Ritter declares.

In 1970, Bluhm and his family left New York City for the town of Millbrook in upstate New York. “The city gave way to the countryside, and Bluhm was ready to leave his exploration of free-form, all-over compositions behind in favor of more sinuous, more sensuous, ways of constructing space.” The paintings in the exhibition display fluid forms with sharp contours, and complex compositions that seem to burst with improvisation, and zones of flat, unmodulated color that are delicately accented with whips and splatters of paint.

Ritter reveals, “The significance of the 70s for Bluhm’s art can be seen by looking backwards at what preceded it, but also forward at what was to come. His paintings from the 70s marked a watershed in his drive to bring a romanticism of the body into Abstract Expressionism, and the work that followed, in the 80s and 90s, would take this focus further, to extreme and often challenging ends.”