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Press contact: Kendy Genovese,
Weinstein Gallery
kendy@weinstein.com / 415-362-8151
Exhibition: Hassel Smith
Venue: Weinstein Gallery, 291 Geary Street, Second Floor, San Francisco
Dates: October 27 – December 8, 2012
Exhibition opening reception:
Saturday, October 27, 6–9 PM
Roundtable Discussion: 4 PM
Online catalogue and link to
view the exhibition: weinstein.com
"Hassel Smith is one of the most under-appreciated American painters of the post-war era."
—critic Tyler Green
San Francisco, CA - Weinstein Gallery is honored to present Hassel Smith, the first major retrospective of the artist to be mounted in San Francisco in more than thirty years. Revered by Art in America as a "West Coast underground legend," Hassel Smith was a critically acclaimed painter and respected innovator in the early abstract experimentations taking place in post–World War II California. Synthesizing the art, jazz, poetry and politics of the day into his breakthrough paintings, Smith became a central figure in what is now called the San Francisco Renaissance.
Smith's influential legacy began at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where he worked alongside such artists such as Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, David Park, and others, under the leadership of the legendary curator Douglas MacAgy. He would enjoy highly successful solo shows at Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco, the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, as well as Gimpel Fils in London and André Emmerich in New York City. Smith would also be honored with three retrospective exhibitions during his life time at San Francisco Museum of Art in 1975, the Oakland Museum of Art in 1981, and the Sonoma County Museum in 2002.
Yet as important and influential as Hassel Smith was, the man and his works have been conspicuously absent from any major exhibitions of American art and sadly relegated to a mere footnote in the history of Abstract Expressionism. Because of this, the artist's innovative paintings dating from the late 1960s—when he moved to England—to the late 1990s have not received the critical attention that they deserve. It is time for Smith's entire body of work to be seen and considered again by a larger American public.
This six decade retrospective at Weinstein Gallery coincides with the release of the first major monograph of the artist published by Prestel and featuring critical and biographical essays by Dr. Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Paul Karlstrom, Susan Landauer, Robert C. Morgan, and Peter Selz. The exhibition includes a range of paintings from each era in an effort to show the complete arc of Hassel Smith's work, elucidating its continuity of form and intention, even as the styles changed. Always iconoclastic, Smith's long career moved fluidly from figuration to abstraction to non-objective and back again, but the artist's vision remained uniquely his own.
A roundtable discussion preceding the opening reception will include the authors of the monograph, as well as Dr. David Anfam, curator of the Clyfford Still Museum, and Mark Harrington of the Hassel Smith Estate.
View the exhibition and catalogue online ›
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