Ed Clark, Without a Doubt, Hauser & Wirth, London

Ed Clark, Untitled (Paris), 1998

Before going to see the Ed Clark exhibition at Hauser & Wirth's Saville Row space, I was convinced I would find something familiar. Even though I didn't know Clark's work, I thought "how different can it be?" New York School emerging in the 1950s, working in the 1970s and 1980s, pushing painting. beyond abstraction ... it all sounded like something I knew well. 

Ed Clark, Without a Doubt
Installation View, Hauser & Wirth

However, the work turned out to be different from what I was expecting.The surprise in the painting comes in the frequently hard lines of the stroke and the rainbow of colours inside those lines. The colours and composition were familiar —blues, pinks, some spectacular reds moving across the horizontal line of the canvas. In some paintings the movement was on the vertical, or in curvature, always stopping short of connection with other colours and other movements.The innovation of the movement's direction was curious and gave pause for reflection. But what makes Clark's brushstroke special is its application. 

Ed Clark, Untitled, 1996

Clark pours multi-coloured paint and then uses a household broom to sweep swathes of thick oil paint across, up and down and around the canvas What the art world knows as Clark's "big sweep" results in wide multi-coloured strokes in which purples, greens, yellows, greys appear out of opposite and unrelated colours to surprise us. Though, at first sighting, it seems as though the unexpected colours emerge from the crevices of the main colour, when we realize that Clark has swept the paints with a broom, the painting starts to makes sense. This is how he has produced the distinct line that cuts through many of the images.

Ed Clark, Paris Gothic, 1993

As I walked around Hauser and Wirth's gallery, I couldn't help thinking of Mondrian's sea compositions. While Mondrian's canvases were muted and limited in palette, the shape and composition seems like the obvious precursor to Clark's. The oval composed on the vertical, that strange, in between shape that is neither circle nor oblong is the shape that Mondrian used a century ago to challenge the conventions of composition. As early as 1911, he painted within an oval matte, and then by 1914, the edges of the oval themselves had become blurred. Clark similarly pushes at the limits and boundaries of the expectations of painting. He becomes one of the first artists to paint on shaped canvases. Assuming that Clark had his supports custom made, I was reminded also of his distance from the gestural marks of painting so beloved by his fellow Abstract Expressionists.  

Ed Clark, Untitled, 1976

Brooms and buckets, together with custom made frames should produce an aesthetic of coldness and remove. Yet, they are warm and sensuous, reminding us of sun rises and sunsets over the ocean. Thus, what makes the paintings unexpected and unique is that the application of paint, and the sometimes aggressive changes he makes to the canvas add up to something quite different again: these paintings are nuanced and lush, reminding of nature, where their technique would logically suggest the very opposite.