Paper Through the Ages

Feb 27 - Apr 2, 2016
Installation Views
Press release

ACA Galleries is pleased to announce Paper Through the Ages, an exhibition featuring works on paper from the 19th century to the present.

Works on paper demand a high level of skill. The very fragility of paper requires a deftness of hand and finesse of media, be it pencil, ink, charcoal, watercolor, or varieties of printmaking. The challenge —and elegance— of works on paper has lured artists for centuries, but only the very best have proved worthy of assuming a place in the history of art. This exhibition showcases some of the artists who have earned a place in that canon.

Among the earliest works in the show is an 1883 watercolor, Castle of San Juan d’Ulloa, Vera Cruz, by Thomas Moran (1837-1926). Moran employs a near monotone palette to achieve a lush rendering of Mexico’s architecture in its natural environment.

The show takes us through the twentieth century and into our own time, from the simple, confident Portrait of Elizabeth Savage by Joseph Stella (1877-1946), the sympathetic rendering in Isabel Bishop’s (1902-1988) Two Girls, through contemporary artists Edgar Jerins’ moody investigations of humanity and Richard Hambleton’s lively gestural portrayal of a horse and rider.

Six works by Frank Stella, Illustrations after El Lissitzky’s Had Gadya, 1982-1984, were inspired by a set of gouaches by the Russian avant-garde artist, El Lissitzky (1890-1941), created for the Passover song Had Gadya. Stella represented each line of the song in a series of prints.

ACA Galleries’ exhibition PAPER THROUGH THE AGES reveals the power and subtlety, brashness and discipline, and most of all the skill and vision, of some of America’s finest artists including: George Ault, Peggy Bacon, George Bellows, Siona Benjamin, Isabel Bishop, Ilya Bolotowsky, Charles Burchfield, Matthew Daub, Lyonel Feininger, Tsugouharu Foujita, Balcomb Greene, Gertrude Greene, Richard Hambleton, Edgar Jerins, Jasper Johns, Henry Koerner, Walt Kuhn, Greg Lamarche, Jan Matulka, Thomas Moran, Francis Louis Mora, Jules Pascin, John Singer Sargent, Joseph Stella, Frank Stella, Bradley Theodore and Abraham Walkowitz, among others.