Lawrence Fine Art is pleased to announce that it will present “Anna Walinska: Abstractions from the 50s and 60s” at its East Hampton Gallery. The installation, part of the gallery’s Summer of Abstraction, will be on display through Labor Day.
A number of the works in this exhibition were shown during the artist’s lifetime at the Jewish Museum in NYC (1957 one-woman retrospective), the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Religious Art at St. John the Divine. The exhibition also includes works inspired by Walinska’s extended stay in Burma in 1954-55.
Anna Walinska was a women ahead of her time. The American painter was born in London in 1906, she ventured from NYC to Paris in the twenties to study painting. In the WPA era, she founded a gallery on 57th Street, where she gave Arshile Gorky his first NYC one-man exhibit. In the fifties, she traveled the world keeping a diary of her six-month journey that now resides in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and includes stories about her adventures with journalist Joseph Alsop, Burmese Prime Minister U Nu, and many other writers, artists and diplomats.
She is known for her colorful works of the Modernist period, large black & white Abstract Expressionist paintings, collages done with handmade Burmese Shan paper, and a substantial body of work in various media on the theme of the Holocaust. She is represented in numerous museum collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, the Johnson Museum at Cornell, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
The opening is scheduled for August 15th, 2015 from 5-8pm.
Walinska’s work spans nine decades, with the oldest known watercolor dating to 1918. Over her lifetime, she produced more than 2000 works on canvas and paper, created with oil, watercolor, charcoal, pastel, casein, ink, assemblage, and any combination of materials that intrigued her. Her work, Walinska wrote, “sought to convey the spirit of a search without boundaries.”
