Alan Shields: Canvas & Constructions 1973-2003

From May 27 – June 27, 2010, The Drawing Room gallery in East Hampton is pleased to present "Alan Shields (1944- 2005) Canvas and Constructions", an exhibition of selected stitched and stained canvases and sculpture from the 1970s through 2003. Educated as an engineer at Kansas State University, Shields turned to theater before making a name for himself in the vibrant New York art scene of the1960s. Represented from 1969 to 1991 by the Paula Cooper Gallery, Shields has been shown broadly around the world and his work is in the permanent collections of all major museums including MoMA, the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum.

While the modernist tenet of faithfulness to materials still prevailed in the 1950s and 60s, Minimalism’s reverence for the flatness of the stretched canvas became suspect. Shields and his contemporaries Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol Le Witt and Donald Judd were enthralled by process and transformed the conundrum of the stretched canvas into combines, wall drawings and in Johns’ case, a lifelong investigation of the persistence of the canvas object. From the start, Shields approached painting as an experiential, multimedia expression born of an intuitive comfort with a complexity of visual systems which required the metaphorical and physical quality of soft canvas.

See below for full press release and selected works.