White & Yellow Caligraphy
HENDRIK GRISE
White & Yellow Caligraphy
Main Attributes:
Artist:Hendrik Grise Title:White & Yellow Caligraphy Work:Drawing / Work on Paper Medium:Mixed Media Substrate:Paper Date:c. 1965 Signed: Estate Stamp/Rep. Size:26.00" x 40.00" Pricing:Price Upon Request Details:A bold, lyrical abstract work by the underrated & emerging (period) California modernist - Hendrik Grise. Mix-media on paper.
When Hendrik Grise arrived on the Southern California “art scene” in the mid-40’s, he joined a “group of painters” working there that would go on to make the region “an internationally prominent modern-art center and defined the L.A. Look” - one that reflected the actual circumstances of the modern West Coast artistic experience in all its richness.
Grise personally knew the important, New York School painter, Mark Tobey, who, like Grise, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and had an early career as a fashion illustrator. Grise was familiar with Toby’s signature “white writing,” calligraphic marks that “conveyed energy and light, [which] appear in different media.
Grise’s work also relates to the type of "all-over" painting style made famous by Jackson Pollock, another American painter from whom Grise drew inspiration. It’s interesting to point out that Pollock was known to attend “all of Tobey's Willard Gallery shows” after which Pollock “went back home and blew them up to 9 by 12 feet, pouring paint onto the canvas instead of brushing it on.”
The parallel with Pollock - as to how Grise and Toby’s work relate, is almost too convenient, in that Grise can be said to have gone “back home” to his studio, where he “blew” up Toby’s work.
Grise's work is only now receiving serious scholarly review - he is an important emerging artist associated with the post-war Southern California Modernist school.
Provenance:
Grise Estate sale, c. 1983
Private art picker, from above.
Private art collector / dealer, San Diego, CA; from above.
Bradley Fine Art, CA; from (relative) above.
BENTON GALLERY, from above; 2018