AL LOVING (1935-2005)
Available Work | Biography
Biography • Al Loving (1935-2005)
Alvin Loving served as an illustrator in the United States Army from 1958 to 1960. Aware of the power of realism for propaganda purposes from his time in the military, when he finished his BFA in 1963 he chose to pursue abstraction. Loving received his MFA in 1965 and settled on the cube motif as his subject to explore. The inspiration came from the embedded squares in Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series. While Albers liked the flatness of the square to examine color, Loving explored the three dimensionality of the crystal structure and how color could be used to suggest depth.
By 1970 Alvin Loving allowed the shape of the support to define the composition on the canvas. Loving’s cubes become hexagons or multi-cubed constructions like Demar and Lauri’s Summer, 1971. Loving’s work suggests both the rational with the geometric structure and symmetry of the piece as well as the mystical and emotional with the color play of each piece. Loving liked to title his works in connection with the time and place of their making.
Alvin Loving moved from Detroit to New York City in 1968 and shortly thereafter received a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969. He was the first African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the museum. Out of the exhibition the museum purchased Rational Irrationalism, 1969.
With the increased violence of the Vietnam War and the Black Power movement, Loving began to distance himself from the logically structured geometry of the 1960s. By 1971 Loving cut up sixty of his geometric canvases and stitched them back together in gestural configurations. Loving’s later work though still abstract referenced designs of different African societies as well as American quilt making, especially of his own grandmother’s.