Ed Clark

Ed Clark emerged in the 1950s as a pioneer of the New York School of painting. His avant-garde approaches to Abstraction, namely the innovative wielding of a push broom to expand the painterly gesture at a massive scale as well as pioneering the shaped canvas, cultivated a unique and recognizable form of expressionism that radically impacted contemporary painting. Clark’s experimentations with pure color, abstract form, and materiality yielded a remarkably original body of work that pushed the boundaries of abstraction beyond expressionism, leaving a lasting impact on the language of American Abstraction and establishing the artist as a visionary within his practice. Born in New Orleans, Clark attended the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to Paris to attend the L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere where he was taught by Louis Ritman and Edouard Goerg. Clark continued to live in Paris after his schooling, working alongside other ex-patriot artists and creative figures including Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Beauford Delaney, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and James Baldwin. It was in dialogue with these artists that Clark began to explore the expressive propensities of abstraction. In what the artist termed “the big sweep,” Clark applied paint onto the canvas using a standard workman’s broom, an innovation that allowed him to create broad strokes of color at an imposing scale. A testament to the crucial impact of his oeuvre, Clark’s works are included in the permanent collections of esteemed institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Detroit Institute of the Arts; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, amongst others.