William Perehudoff: Five Decades

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William Perehudoff, “AC-88-4,” 1988

acrylic on canvas, 43.5 x 43.5 inches (courtesy of the Gallery)

Opening: November 28^th, 2024, 5:30-7:30pm

Newzones is honoured to present William Perehudoff: Five Decades, a solo exhibition of exemplary works spanning from the 1960s to the early 2000s. Bringing together a thoughtfully curated selection of paintings directly from the acclaimed artist’s Estate, Five Decades delves into Perehudoff’s richly varied oeuvre, highlighting his unique and highly regarded sensibilities toward line, colour and form. 

Born in Saskatchewan in 1918, Perehudoff’s career began in the early 1940s. Between 1948-1949, he studied with French artist Jean Chariot at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, and from 1949-1950, with Amédée Ozenfant at the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York. Unsurprisingly, with such strong connections to American colour field and European abstract movements, Perehudoff’s painting shifted, and his focus turned to formalist abstraction. As a result, his work gave rise to generations of artists, both working in colour field and formalist abstraction, setting a national precedence for contemporary painting itself. 

Throughout each decade of his career, Perehudoff’s abstracts progressed through visible and distinctive phases – each of which have made notable contributions to the history of abstraction. Five Decades boasts an exquisite work on canvas from the 1960s, a period that became known primarily for geometric abstraction and large-scale works with bright, rectangular blocks of colour. The narrative continues with paintings from the 1970s, as Perehudoff began to incorporate circular elements, often juxtaposed with hard-edged rectangular shapes. Also, during this decade, there was a shift to the application of thin lines of pure hues, largely on neutral stained backgrounds. The 1980s are defined predominately by the use of thick, impasto ‘gels’, as well as the development of gestural and organic mark-making. The exhibition culminates with the exploration of work from the 1990s and early 2000s (Perehudoff stopped painting in 2001), which explore, once again, large-scale canvases and geometric shapes overlapping with a lively composition that burst towards the canvas edge. In fact, many art critics agree that the paintings of this time period are reminiscent of work from the 1960s. Thus, in effect, Perehudoff’s oeuvre comes “full circle” by the end of his painting career.

William Perehudoff met New York art critic Clement Greenberg in 1962, which was a key point in his life as an artist. Greenberg was an influential New York art critic, and highly regarded for his promotion of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Also highly influential in Perehudoff’s art practice was his active participation in the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, which was in fact led by Greenberg in that same year. In 1988, Perehudoff himself became a workshop leader. 

In 2010, a traveling retrospective was organized by the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (now Remai Modern), curated by esteemed New York art critic Karen Wilkin. The Optimism of Colour: William Perehudoff, a retrospective first opened at Mendel Art Gallery in October 2010. The exhibition then traveled to Kamloops Art Gallery, BC and Glenbow Museum, Calgary in 2011 and in 2012 it was on view at first the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario and lastly at Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario.

William Perehudoff’s work has been collected world-wide and can be found in collections such as: the National Gallery of Canada, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Remai Modern, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Glenbow Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery and National Gallery of Modern Arts (New Delhi, India) to name a few.