Al Loving

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Al Loving
Image Not Available for Al Loving

Al Loving

American, 1935-2005
BiographyAl Loving was born in Detroit and earned an MFA in painting at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, moving to New York City in 1968. Loving found enormous early success with precise geometric abstract paintings in intense colors; feeling confined by these “boxes,” in the early 1970s, he shifted into unstretched, torn, and collaged canvases that hung from the wall, evoking family quilts he saw as a child. He took these experiments into the realm of paper, using handmade and intricately cut forms—most often his signature spiral—to build exuberant and organic compositions. Over the years, Loving has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and numerous group exhibitions.

“Now the jazz musicians don’t invent their own instruments, but they radicalize the sound of conventional instruments. Well that’s basically what we do. We take ordinary materials and we try to make it, transform it, in a manner that you can’t tell what it is. . . . Where it begins or where it ends.”
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