Alvin D. Loving was an African-American abstract expressionist painter whose illustrious career spanned from the 1960s through the 80s, with works featured in some of the most famous modern art museums in the country, like The Whitney and Guggenheim. He was born Alvin Demar Loving Jr. on September 19, 1935 in Detroit, MI, earning an MFA from the University of Illinois in 1963.
In 1968, Loving relocated to New York, where he found himself among a social milieu which included artists Robert Duran, Alan Shields, Howardena Pindell, Richard Van Buren, and the dancer and choreographer Batya Zamir. A year later, in 1969, Loving famously became the first African-American to have a one-person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Unlike many African-American artists whose art focused on the racial politics of the era, Loving was a staunch abstractionist. His early works were built upon strict yet simple geometric shapes — often hexagonal or cubic modules.
In the 1970s the artist became disenchanted with his earlier, hard-edge geometric paintings. Loving dispensed with notions of centralized composition, figure/ground separation, and pictorial frame in his later torn canvas and collaged paper works. By the 1980s, Loving began to integrate other materials into his constructions, such as corrugated cardboard and rag paper. He combined hundreds of pieces of cut and torn canvas or paper into an abundance of overlapping patterns and shapes, their rich and intuitive array of colors stretching irregularly, spiraling outward, surrounding the space, and engulfing the viewer.
Loving quickly took a liking to the casualness of tearing cardboard and gluing it onto other pieces; in fact, he considered this practice abstract expressionist as well. Unlike the fabric constructions, the large paper collages gave him a sense of freedom because he was trekking through uncharted territory. Loving integrated circles and spirals into a collage, a nod to his African roots and as an expression of growth and continued life. Each spiral has been carefully painted and placed to create dynamic color relationships and clinging flatly to the canvas.
We are privileged to have one of Al Loving's pieces from the 1980s collection from the Wild Goose Lake series. This original abstract impressionist painting is in excellent condition, featuring his iconic acrylic, splattering, and mixed media on canvas. Hardware on the back suggests hanging the painting in diamond perspective. We will be featuring the gorgeous work at The Kings Cumberland Estate Sale.
