Henry Pearson | Selected Drawings 1959 - 1969
April 24 through May 30, 2003
Reception for the artist April 24 from 5 to 7 pm
The gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of Henry Pearson's work on paper
from 1959-1969. The show consists of 12 ink and 4 watercolor and ink drawings. It will remain on view through May 30.
Like many of his generation, Henry Pearson (b. 1914) served in the army during the Second World War. It was his original training in set design at Yale that led him to an assignment in the art department working on training films for the Army Air Force. Pearson’s interpretive drawings of secret imperial maps allowed the topography of Japan to be recreated in a three-dimensional model that enabled pilots to pre-visualize their destinations and targets. After the war, Pearson re-enlisted as a medic in order to live in Japan and immerse himself in the culture.
There is an undeniable reference to topographical maps in the intimate line drawings Pearson later created. The landscape that Pearson references however is not literal but interior and emotional. The drawings curve and turn in on themselves, then expand and contract. Each line always referencing the preceding line. Pearson has characterized the linear movement in the drawings as "breathing" and compares their non-objective nature to abstract music.
When Pearson arrived in New York in 1953 he enrolled in classes at The Art Students League. While there he studied with Will Barnet and Reginald Marsh among others. Pearson’s work in the 1950’s dealt with rectilinear abstraction, and it was during this period that he developed his mature voice.
Pearson’s work was included in The Museum of Modern Art’s The Responsive Eye in 1965 and was thereby linked with Op Art. While his work is somewhat optically illusory his delicately wrought lines are wavy, imperfect and intuitive - a metaphor for our human existence. In contrast the Op Artists usually deployed a more hard-edged, mechanical technique often eliminating any trace of the human touch. Lucy Lippard eloquently argues Pearson’s case in the essay, New York Letter, which appeared in 1965 in Art International:
Pearson does not depend solely on optical illusionism and pulsating color but has an arsenal of arresting images which evoke the grandeur of natural forces but are entirely abstract in their emphasis on surface action and a delicate asymmetricality.
This will be Pearson’s first New York exhibition since his last one-man show at Marilyn Pearl Gallery in 1987. Pearson is included in the current Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, Recent Acquisitions of Works on Paper: Drawings from 21 Living Artists with Focus on Abstraction.