LAWRENCE CALCAGNO: REDUX

LAWRENCE CALCAGNO: REDUX
26th September, 2024 – 3rd November, 2024
Amar Gallery
Kirkman House
12-14 Whitfield Street
London, W1T 2RF

Amar Gallery is proud to announce the exhibition Lawrence Calcagno: Redux, featuring paintings & works on paper by LGBT+ artist Lawrence Calcagno. The exhibition is transatlantic with 203 Fine Art, USA exhibiting works in their Taos, New Mexico space and Amar Gallery exhibiting works in London. This is the first time many of these works have been exhibited in London. Calcagno’s life is nothing short of remarkable and this exhibition aims to bring a master of art back to the forefront of art history.

In 1941 at the beginning of World War II Calcagno joined the United States Army Air Corps, where he served for three years. During his service he was recognised as an artist. His drawing titled: “Watch in the Night” won first prize in the national Army art contest in the Southwest Regional competition.

Benefiting from the G.I. Bill in 1947 Lawrence Calcagno enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, California. His teachers were Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still along with instructors, Edward Corbett and Richard Diebenkorn. In 1950 he left California School of Fine Arts for Europe.

He went to Paris, France to study at L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno, an unlikely pair, the two became friends and lovers in Paris in the early 1950s and remained close over the next twenty years. At the time of their union, both interracial and homosexual relations were illegal throughout most of the United States. Through Delaney, Calcagno became friends with writers such as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.

Calcagno was friends with the African American artist Jack Whitten. In 1964 Calcagno supported Whitten alongside artists Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Wayne Thiebaud to secure Whitten a grant for minority artists from the John Hay Whitney Fellowship. Supporting artists of colour was important to Calcagno. In 1965 Calcagno became Andrew Mellon Professor in Painting at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he stayed until 1968. Calcagno was a fellow at the McDowell and Yaddo artist colonies in 1960s.

As Time Magazine wrote in 1955 “Calcagno remains emphatically from San Francisco is demonstrated by his semiabstract paintings, saturated with rich California earth tones and the shifting, fog-ridden horizons of the Pacific Coast.” In 2024 Hyperallergic Magazine wrote “Although frequently introduced as a student of Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, abstract expressionist painter Lawrence Calcagno was his own master.”

LAWRENCE CALCAGNO: REDUX opens on the 26th of September, 2024 until the 3rd of November, 2024 at Amar Gallery

©2024 Amar Gallery