Union League Club of Chicago’s Post

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Untitled Painting by David Sharpe The ULCC's piece is from Sharpe’s early “Organic Abstraction” period with influences like Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee (Expressionism), Joan Miro (Surrealism) and the Pop Art movement, but also of his slightly older Chicago-based contemporaries like Ed Paschke, a group referred to as the “Chicago Imagists,” and their style as Imagism. ___________________________________________________________ David Sharpe was born in 1944 in Owensboro, Kentucky. He studied at the School of the Art Institute and worked in Chicago until 1970. He began showing his work as an undergraduate in 1964. He moved to New York city in 1970 where he still lives today. The Union League Club of Chicago's piece is dated 1972. Sharpe's work was recognized very early in his career for its formal sophistication and maturity, which some critics suggest provided him with the confidence and credibility to develop it in relatively dramatic, stylistic shifts, recognized for their command of color, handling of paint, complex compositions, and wide array of formal strategies. His work can be organized into three relatively distinct bodies: 1) Organic Abstraction, such as our piece, which mixes the traditions of Kandinsky, Klee, Miró, and Pop Art (1967–1973); 2) Abstract Landscapes from the early 1970s–1979, and 3) Abstract Representational work (late 1970s). Speaking of his early paintings, former MCA Chicago curator Lynne Warren wrote that Sharpe's work represents "an important body of abstract work" completed while Chicago Imagism was the predominant style in the city in the late 1960’s. The New Art Examiner’s Jane Allen described Imagist work as an organic blend of Imagism and mainstream American abstraction. Art in America’s Joanna Frueh suggested Sharpe’s formal experiments were a quest to realize the inspiration experienced by early modernists and the Abstract Expressionists within an independent language that rivaled, but did not imitate them - think Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko. Sharpe has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), The Drawing Center, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Chicago Cultural Center, among others. #art #artist #chicago #expressionist #abstract #clublife

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