Created in 1989, ‘Patel Wheel’ exemplifies Ed Clark’s celebrated Broken Rainbow series, which marked a departure from the linearity of his earlier paintings and a shift to a more loose and assertive style. Throughout his career, Clark’s experimentations with pure color and the physicality of paint yielded remarkable creative renewal. In this series, Clark’s famous ‘big sweep’—an innovative technique for applying paint using a push broom—becomes arched, colors are expertly mixed and white paint lies at the center of swathes of color, so that the curves appear volumetric or tubular. This breakup of the horizontal line marked a greater act of freedom within his practice, as his tubular strokes were now diving and sweeping with a curved motion. A harmonious interplay of pastel shades and vibrant pinks ripple across ‘Patel Wheel’ in gentle arcs, reminiscent of the ethereal haze of a sunrise. Demonstrating Clark’s singular approach to abstraction, ‘Patel Wheel’ proposes a poetic treatise on color and the materiality of paint.
Born in New Orleans in 1926 and raised in Chicago, Ed Clark emerged in the 1950s as a pioneer of the New York School. His advancements have an important place in the story of modern and contemporary art: in the late 1950s he was the first American artist credited with exhibiting a shaped canvas, an innovation that continues to reverberate today. His search for a means to breach the limitations of the conventional paintbrush led him to use a push broom to apply pigment to a canvas laid out on the floor. Defying the discrete categories of gestural and hard-edged abstraction, Clark masterfully interwove these approaches into a unique form of expressionism.
Artwork images © The Estate of Ed Clark. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer
Portrait © The Estate of Ed Clark. Photo: Chester Higgins Jr/The New York Times/Redux