ABE
AJAY
Constructions and Collages
April
14, 2001 - June 17, 2001
A
retrospective exhibition of American Artist,
Abe Ajay (1919 - 1998), one of this century's
most inventive assemblage sculptors will
be at the Reading Public Museum April 14
- June 17, 2001. The exhibition Abe Ajay:
Constructions and Collages was organized
by the Palmer Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania
State University, University Park, PA and
is the first ever national tour of Ajay's
works spanning the four decades of his career.
The artist retained all of the works in
this exhibit during his lifetime and many
have never been on public display.
A
native of Altoona, Pennsylvania, Abe Ajay
left his home for New York City in 1937
where he worked as a graphic designer and
a freelance illustrator for approximately
twenty years landing accounts with some
of the country's leading corporations and
publications.
In
the late 1950s, Ajay began to phase out
his commercial work in order to accommodate
his interest in returning to fine art, specifically
painting. In 1963 he abruptly abandoned
painting and retreated to rural Connecticut
and began experimenting with three-dimensional
sculptural construction. In fact, it was
a chance discovery of discarded wooden cigar
molds that suggested the possibilities of
this new three-dimensional medium and language.
Armed with a table saw to carve the molds
every which way, he then combined them with
other found objects into a series of relief
constructions. He had his first one-man
show in New York in 1964 at the Rose Fried
Gallery.
By
1967, Ajay was casting in polyester resins
from molds of his own design. The artist
created what was, in effect, a modular vocabulary,
white castings which were housed in boxes
paneled with layers of colored plexiglas.
Although frequently referred to as sculpture,
the modular geometric reliefs were essentially
frontal. These finely worked forms were
to become the letters in Ajay's infinitely
repeatable alphabet and eventually in his
integrated visual language. From the initial
Plexiglas Series (1967-69) he then began
coupling the modules with colored canvas
panels in a series of relief paintings from
1970-75. Then, in search of variety he next
added to the vocabulary several cast resin
motifs drawn from the earliest construction
to produce a medley of all-white sculptural
reliefs from 1976-78. Why all the craftsmanship?
Not merely an exercise in technical virtuosity,
but the necessity of a language if it were
to evoke everything from a utopian urban
environment to Byzantine architecture and
sublime comtemporary abstraction. Ajay said
at the time, "I have created a private
family of three-dimensional modular forms,
each of which is marriageable with any or
all of the others. I employ them intuitively
and formally in metric measure much as music
composed within the infinite boundaries
of a twelve-tone scale."
After
three years of working exclusively with
white and its ambiguous shadows, and seeking
respite from 15 years of construction, Ajay
woke up one morning hungry for color once
again. The result was a series of subtly
colored collages, with a freedom born of
the informality of the material and the
soft edges of torn, hand colored paper.
For the next several years, he did little
else. Although he continued to make collages
through 1984, Ajay returned to construction
in 1980. However, after a serious illness
rendered the production of three-dimensional
work impossible, Ajay revisited the medium
of collage in the early 1990s, and it became
his exclusive means of expression for the
remainder of his career. These later works
exhibit a greater range in color, texture
and treatment of the paper. Perhaps most
significant, however, is the lyricism, certainly
inherent but less overt in the constructions,
that Ajay managed to achieve while still
adhering to a constructivist perspective.
"I am engaged in a constant search
for that hidden world within the material
itself", said Ajay. This hidden world
emerges from found objects: cigar molds,
knobs, dowels, geometric blocks or transparent
papers to which Ajay gave concrete form.
Robert
Metzger, Ph.D
Director, CEO, Chief Curator Reading
Public Museum |
