Lawrence Fine Art is pleased to announce that it will open "Anna Walinska: Abstractions from the 50s and 60s" at its East Hampton gallery with an opening reception on Saturday, August 15 from 5-8 pm. The show will continue for approximately three weeks. Nearly all of the works were shown at her career retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1957. The show is part of the gallery's "Summer of Abstraction," which aims to explore the continued evolution of abstraction as an artistic medium.

"The story of the post-WWII New York School artists is still being written," said Gallery Director Howard Shapiro.  "When we get beyond the usual names, we find a whole coterie of artists--many of them women--whose work and careers deserve reappraisal.  Walinska is one of those artists. We call them 'Rediscovered Masters.'"

Walinska produced an incredibly cohesive body of work: her exploration of black and white are a leitmotiv across her career. In the 50s and 60s, she married this exploration to abstraction.

"Although one would call the work from the 50s and 60s 'Abstract Expressionism', its motivation, in our opinion, is different from what motivated so many of her male counterparts in the New York School," explained Shapiro. "Quite simply, the New York School artists were about the 'self' expressing itself with little or no reality beyond. Walinska, on the other hand, was searching for something greater than the self." 

A revidew of her solo exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1957 explains that Walinska (1906-1997) was pursuing abstraction on two levels: abstraction of form and abstraction of color. This double abstraction aims toward a spiritual-imaginative realization.  "In this double abstraction, of form and color, a process of spiritualization occurs, analogous to those schools in Far Eastern art which dismiss color to provoke the imagination."

Walinska first studied at the Art Students League before leaving to Paris in 1926 where she studied with Andre L'hote. She exhibited at the Salon des Independents. Returning to the U.S., she opened her own gallery and was the first U.S. gallery to exhibit the work of Arshille Gorky.

Walinska exhibited frequently, including the Pennsylvania Academy, the Met, the Baltimore Museum and MOMA. She had a one-woman retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1957.