Al Loving (1935-2005) Monumental Mixed Media on Canvas, Circa 1970s

Lot description

Monumental, museum quality artwork fabricated from stained, torn, cut, and sewn canvas, hanging on wooden rod. Approximately 80 in H x 120 in W. Weighs approximately 11 lbs 14 oz. Artist Bio: Alvin D. Loving Jr., known as Al Loving, was born in Detroit in 1935 and earned his BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963 and MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. After moving to New York City in 1968 and settling in the Hotel Chelsea, he achieved rapid recognition with his first solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art within a year. Throughout his distinguished career, Loving received three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1970, 1974, 1984) and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, while creating major public commissions including murals in Detroit, a 54-foot painting for the Empire State Collection, ceramic murals for Detroit's People Mover stations, and 70 stained-glass windows for Brooklyn's Broadway Junction subway station. Loving's work evolved through three distinct phases that explored complex color relationships and material abstraction. Beginning with hard-edge geometric abstractions inspired by Josef Albers in the 1960s—featuring polyhedrons arranged in powerful compositions that expressed refracted light and time—he transitioned in the early 1970s to innovative fabric constructions after viewing the Whitney's quilts exhibition, creating large flowing works by sewing together strips of painted and later dyed canvas. His final phase focused on monumental paper collages incorporating torn cardboard, rag paper, and printed materials arranged in spirals and circles that referenced his African roots and expressed themes of growth and perpetual motion. Loving exhibited extensively throughout his life at venues including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Studio Museum in Harlem, Fondation Maeght in France, and numerous other institutions, with his work now held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. He died in New York in 2005 at age 69.