ACA Galleries is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition JACK LEVINE and HYMAN BLOOM: AGAINST THE GRAIN on view September 18 through October 25, 2014. The exhibition will feature a survey of paintings and works on paper from the 1930s to 1990s from the artists’ estates and private collections.
Jack Levine (1915-2010) and Hyman Bloom (1913-2009) were close friends who each became a master of a new American realism that blended abstraction and realism. As Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, of a similar age and background, they arrived at their socially conscious art through shared experiences but through different routes of development.
But “realism” did not mean “traditional”. The genie of modernism could not be put back into the bottle. Instead, these socially conscious artists created a new realist language; an edgy aesthetic that brought realism and modernist abstract elements into a restless but electrifying visual alliance.