Richard Poussette-Dart, “Edge of Form,” 1976, acrylic and graphite on paper, 22½ by 30¼ inches.

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RICHARD POUSETTE-DART AT KNOEDLER & COMPANY w/1 cut

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NEW YORK CITY — “Richard Pousette-Dart: Drawing Form is Verb” is on view through March 8 at Knoedler Gallery, in association with the estate of Richard Pousette-Dart. This selection includes the artist’s drawings and paintings on paper of the 1970–1990s.

These works on paper reflect the critical importance they have in the artist’s work both “as modes for generating new concepts and also complete and finished works in themselves.” Also included in the exhibition is one seminal paintings, “White Cathedral,” 1984–1989, pencil, gesso and oil on linen, 90 by 90 inches, which bears an unmistakable relationship to the artist’s expressions on paper.

In 2001–2002, a museum retrospective, “The Living Edge: Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) Work on Paper,” organized by the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, was the first major exhibition to focus on the significance of this aspect of Pousette-Dart’s work in his career. The drawings were also the subject  of a 2006–2007 traveling exhibition, “Transparent Reflections: Richard Pousette-Dart Works on Paper 1940–1992” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Cincinnati Art Museum. Many of the works in those exhibitions are included in the present Knoedler show.

As scholar Dr Robert Hobbs, who has written extensively on Pousette-Dart, states in his catalog essay, the works in this exhibition illuminate Pousette-Dart’s exploration of form “as both an activator and a potentially … as both a verb and an inherent capacity,” a direction in his work that pinpoints the philosophical roots he shared with the early Twentieth Century movement, Vorticism — primarily as it was developed in the work of poet Ezra Pound and sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska — and which is fundamental also to understanding Pousette-Dart’s mature development as an Abstract Expressionist.

The gallery is at 19 East 70th Street. For information, www.knoedlergallery.com or 212-794-0550.