Alfred Jensen was an American abstract painter best known for his colourful grids composed of geometric shapes. Inspired by both mathematics and colour theory, the artist created meticulously detailed grids and patterns in impasto. Spiritual and philosophical symbolism figured heavily into his compositions, with Jensen explaining that “this idea that things resonate with or energize each other has guided me in producing my paintings.” Born Alfred Julio Jensen on December 11, 1903, in Guatemala City, Guatemala, the artist travelled extensively in his youth before studying first at the San Diego Fine Arts School, then in Munich with Hans Hofmann after meeting Vaclav Vytlacil and Carl Robert Holty. Jensen moved to the United States in 1934, after Vytlacil supported his enrollment at the Academie Scandinave in Paris. A friend of Mark Rothko and Sam Francis, he exhibited in group shows in New York and abroad throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1985, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum gave Jensen a major retrospective four years after his death on April 4, 1981, in Livingston, NJ. His work is currently held in several public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
text via artnet
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| Alfred Jensen, Hekatompedon Series, Per 7, 1965, MoMA, New York, NY [© 2018 Estate of Alfred Jensen / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York] |
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| Alfred Jensen, Untitled, ca. 1965, MoMA, New York, NY [© 2018 Estate of Alfred Jensen / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York NY] |
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