Alcopley

“Danger lurks at the point when his loaded brush touches the canvas. There is a direct confrontation when image and gesture merge.”

—Herman Cherry, 1982

Shamnoski Gallery presents Alcopley: The Infinite Is Dangerously Far, an exhibition examining the evolution of Alcopley's brushstroke across three decades of work.

The exhibition follows Alcopley across decades of an artist teaching himself, again and again, how to say more with less. In 1959, after a self-imposed exile from America to follow his wife Nina Tryggvadottir to Europe, Alcopley returned to New York City. Freed from the formalism and rigidity that had constrained his work abroad, he began again in 1960, at a moment when, as all artists were, he faced the rise of Pop Art and a changing American art world. Over the years that followed, his gesture narrowed into a single, fluid stroke, his color narrowed into one resonant field, until that stroke alone came to carry the full weight of the canvas.

The exhibition centers on four major late canvases alongside works from the 1960s that trace the brushstroke's path toward that distillation. Herman Cherry, who watched his friend work for forty years, called the instant before the brush meets canvas the true subject of Alcopley's art: "Danger lurks", he wrote, "at the point when his loaded brush touches the canvas."

Alcopley's work was shaped as much by science as by art. Trained as a physician and physiologist under the name Alfred Copley, he founded the disciplines of biorheology and hemorheology, devoting a parallel career to the study of flow itself. "In my pictures" he wrote, "the basic vision is related to modern science and the world view derived from it." He moved through the twentieth century among figures who shared that fascination with invisible forces, including Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Edgard Varèse, and fellow painters Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock, with whom he helped found The Club in Greenwich Village.

The exhibition's title is drawn from one of Alcopley's own epigrams, a reminder that his restless pursuit of the infinite, in both his art and his science, was something he put into words as often as he put it onto canvas.