Included among a minority of women artists in the Abstract Expressionism movement and in the New York School of the 1950s and 60s, Schloss was a bold—and at times brash— presence in the art world. Her work, which spans painting, assemblage, collage, watercolor, and drawing, embraces the intimate, the primitive, and the profound. Her playful still life paintings are often set in the foreground against views out of open windows onto the Mediterranean Sea, celebrating everyday wonders with a delight in pure color and childlike curiosity—yet resolute in representational form. These works, clear manifestations of her budding friendship with Giorgio Morandi at the time, feature groupings of bottles and collected objects, on which Schloss writes: “I look at them and the weather before me and try to have clear ideas about it all and the world, and to put it down in the simplest color and line…Abstract? Figurative? Semiabstract? All art is a fusion of the real outside, and that which is inside us.”

Born in Germany, Schloss immigrated to New York City via London in 1942, where she became an observant member of the Abstract Expressionist movement and part of the thriving community of artists and intellectuals including artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Jack Tworkov, and Larry Rivers; composer John Cage; and poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and John Schuyler. Eventually settling in Rome, Schloss was a noted transatlantic correspondent of art criticism and continued to write and paint until she died in 2011 at the age of 92. In 2021, Schloss’s long-awaited posthumous memoir, The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly; Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and included in New York Times’ Top Books of 2021, deemed a “glowing jewel of a book.”

“I am pleased to celebrate the announcement of this representation and exhibition,” shares Jacob Burckhardt, Estate of Edith Schloss. “Alexandre Gallery has long advocated for the likes of Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Helen Torr. Edith’s life and work will now be aligned with these legacies and recognized as essential in the course of American Modernism.”