February 25 – March 24, 1984
Artists Space is pleased to announce the opening of Sally Hazelet Drummond's exhibition, Paintings, 1971-84, on February 25, 1984. It will run through March 24 and is the second show in a new series at Artists Space that is being sponsored by the Mark Rothko Foundation.
Sally Hazelet Drummond’s show marked the second exhibition in a series sponsored by the Mark Rothko Foundation that would seek to grant exposure to more mature or established artists, whose work had remained outside of a mainstream New York discourse.
Drummond first moved to New York in the late 1940s when she attended Columbia University; at the time, Abstract Expressionism loomed large on the critical horizon, and Drummond found herself thinking about both Ad Reinhardt and Philip Guston as potential clues to overcoming such a way of working. Her own work took a turn when she visited a retrospective of Georges Seurat’s work at MoMA in 1958; She began to employ pointillism’s manner of paint application in her abstract works. The paintings in the 1984 show were simple gradations from a center outward, achieved through stippled paint. The effect is the dissolution of the direct, Abstract Expressionist “gesture,” so that the closer one comes to the painting, the more its form begins to break up. There is a synaesthetic quality to the work; whereas stippled paint evoked certain effects of light in the work of Seurat, in Drummond’s work it seems more analogous to the effects of sound. The paintings vibrate with a quiet ambience–in fact, Drummond referred to her earliest such works as “Silent Painting.”
Sally Hazelet Drummond was born in 1924 in Evanston, Illinois, and is currently living in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Her work was seen most recently in a group exhibition at P.S. 1, "Abstract Painting: 1960-69," in 1983. During the sixties and the seventies, her work was included in exhibitions at the Greene Gallery, which represented her until it closed, and then at the Fischbach Gallery, as well as in many group shows in Europe and the United States. In 1972, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington mounted the first retrospective of her work. Drummond was awarded a Fulbright for study in Venice in 1952-53 as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967-68. Her paintings are included in collections at the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of Art.
Sally Hazelet Drummon's exhibition has been sponsored by the Mark Rothko Foundation.
Artists Space activities are made possible by grants from: the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts; the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Lauder Foundation, Samuel Rubin Foundation; and our corporate sponsors, AT&T Long Lines, Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank, Consolidated Edison, EXXON, Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, R.H. Macy and Company, Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, Philip Morris, and Warner Communications.