The Newark Museum of Art presents Norman Bluhm: Metamorphosis, a retrospective of the American painter Norman Bluhm (1920–1999).
With works dating from 1947 to1998, this is the first monographic survey of Bluhm’s career, bringing together 17 large-scale paintings on canvas and 25 works on paper from the artist’s estate and from distinguished public and private collections. Bluhm combined vigorous and expressive brushwork with a lavish sense of color and formal experimentation on a grand scale.
Looking beyond his well-established reputation as an Abstract Expressionist, this exhibition surveys five decades of Bluhm’s prolific production, foregrounding his later paintings as well as the formative decade he spent in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bluhm’s evolving engagement with his chosen medium, oil paint, and his interests in myth, poetry, and global art history are explored, with emphasis on his integration of figuration into his previously abstract idiom.
Looking beyond his well-established reputation as an Abstract Expressionist, this exhibition presents five decades of Bluhm’s prolific production, foregrounding his later paintings as well as the formative decade he spent in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bluhm’s evolving engagement with his chosen medium, oil paint, and his interests in myth, poetry, and global art history will be explored, with emphasis on his integration of figuration into his previously abstract idiom.