Larry Abramson

We are pleased to present Larry Abramson's solo show, Blue, at Gordon Gallery New York.

Larry Abramson's new paintings are at once images of collapse and reconstruction, their forms repeatedly assembling and falling apart under an indifferent blue sky. Gathered from diverse visual and cultural sources that have been at the center of Abramson's art for decades, such as the geometric language of early abstraction, the schematic conventions of Modernist architecture, and the pseudo-scientific tradition of botanical drawing – his compositions breathtakingly hold their disparate components together in what feels like a transient moment of precarious coexistence.

"The first time I saw one of Larry Abramson's paintings," writes American theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, "my reaction was: 'No. You can't do that.” [The work] struck me not as a modernist collage but as a collision of disparate elements that refused to synthesize yet insisted on appearing together, as if forced to coexist by a pure act of arbitrary artistic will." Despite their light colors and visual playfulness, Abramson's new paintings – possibly in response to the traumatic war his country has been enduring over the past year – carry an underlying sense of tragedy, a sense that "home" and "belonging" are concepts never to be taken for granted. Years ago, Abramson said in an interview: "Art always deals with homelessness. Art stems from a sense of absence, an abyss; there’s always this void between us, a void from which art flows and into which it is drawn." In his new cycle of paintings, it seems that Abramson is offering us fleeting moments of respite, and perhaps even solace, in the blue void of homelessness that engulfs us all.

Larry Abramson was born in South Africa in 1954. He immigrated to Israel with his family in 1961, where they settled in Jerusalem. Currently, he lives and works in Tel Aviv.

In 1973 Abramson studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. Upon his return to Israel, he took a position as a master printer and curator at the Jerusalem Print Workshop, where he worked until 1986. Abramson headed the Art Department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design from 1992 to 1999, where he founded and led the MFA program. He has been a guest lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of Haifa, and the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. Since 2002, he has served as a professor at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Ramat Gan - where he was one of the founders of the Multidisciplinary Art School, which he led from 2013 to 2016.

In his works, Abramson explores and critiques the deep structures of society through the citation and appropriation of landscapes, ideological symbols, and painterly conventions. His works are included in museum collections such as the Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Haifa Museum of Art, and others.

Abramson is also a pivotal theorist of Israeli art, as manifested in the seminal exhibition Mini Israel (2006) which he curated at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and in the published collection of academic and theoretical essays, The Painter is a Spy (2018).