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Clytie Alexander and Raoul Hague

August 18–October 27, 2019

This show featured the work of two abstract artists in dialogue. Through variation within a series, Clytie Alexander created both motion and stillness in her paintings. She uses light and color to draw viewers’ attention to the surrounding space of the gallery as much as to the paintings themselves.

Hudson Valley artist Raoul Hague’s (1904 – 1993) wood sculptures are filled with spatial intensity and profoundly shift their visual identity with changes in the viewer’s vantage point. His finished sculptures often resemble the tree trunks they once were.

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Clytie Alexander’s most recent works are series that focus not only on their surface planes but also on the relationship between the pieces and the space around them. While sharing characteristics with its series each piece is unique and the variations occurring piece to piece create both motion and stillness. Building and modulating color and light and working with “permeable boundaries” Clytie Alexander constructs an experience of seeing the walls on which the work is installed and the work as both natural phenomenon and as finely calibrated visual experience.
Born in Lawrence, Kansas, Clytie Alexander was educated in Quebec and Bangladesh where she studied music and dance. She studied art at UCLA.
She is the recipient of awards and grants that include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Purchase Award 2003, 2007 and 2013; the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, 2005: the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, 1993 and 2001; and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program 1998-2020. Her work resides in public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Getty Research Institute Library, Los Angeles; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fondo Francesco Moschini, Rome, and the Sarabhai Family Foundation, Ahmedabad.
She lives and works in New York, Sante Fe and Los Angeles.

Raoul Hague was born in Constantinople in 1905. When his family moved to Egypt in 1921, he traveled through Marseille, Paris, Le Havre and New York with brief stays in Chicago and Ames, Iowa. He moved to New York City in 1928, where he took classes at the Art Students League with Wiliam Zorach and was introduced to direct carving in stone by John Flannagan. Around 1933, he discovered art colonies in Woodstock, where he would come to move permanently after serving in the U.S. military from 1941 to 1943. It was in Woodstock that his work became fundamentally abstract.
Raoul Hague’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others. He received awards from the Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Mark Rothko Foundation and the American Academy of the Arts and Letters. He died in 1993.

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