From October 13 through November 6, 2015, Menconi + Schoelkopf presents Charles Biederman (1906-2004), including more than twenty works from 1935 to 1985 by this trail-blazing abstract artist. The thirty works on view include sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, with an emphasis on his pioneering work in early abstraction (1935-38).

Several wall reliefs from his later career represent the artist’s post-war oeuvre. Charles Biederman (1906-2004) is a compact retrospective of this important American abstract artist. Biederman was prolific in several media, producing sculptures, paintings, and reliefs with a zeal for exhaustive experimentation. His equally prodigious writings make clear his intentions: to bring direction to an art world that had lost its way, forging an aesthetic program for the twentieth century. Menconi + Schoelkopf presents exemplar works from the estate of the artist displaying his various strategies for the advance of this ambitious program. A suite of drawings from the early- and mid-thirties suggest a preamble to the heart of his career, with their attention to brilliant color and near obsession with the line between image and object. Several large canvases from the middle of the same decade show his exuberant work in oil as he traced abstract ideas through biomorphic forms to mechanical-Cubist visions, fueled by Picasso and Leger. By 1938, however, the painter gave up painting, convinced that the true path forward was not strictly two-dimensional. In the post-war years, Biederam’s writings eclipsed his studio output--he self-published many books on aesthetics and art criticism. Turning back to the birth of Modernism, Biederman concluded that Cezanne's true successor was Piet Mondrian. The realization spurred five decades of vigorous investigation of geometric abstraction. While the remnants of Mondrian linger in certain works on view from the early 1940s, the saturated colors and cascading forms of the later constructions evidence Biederman's own transcendence of any progenitor.

These and fifteen other works by Biederman are illustrated in a fully-illustrated 40-page catalogue with critical essay by noted Biederman scholar Susan C. Larsen, Ph. D, available now. On view through November 6th, 2015.

Menconi + Schoelkopf is open M-F, 9:30 to 5:30, located at 13 East 69 th

Street, #2F, and is open to the public during the exhibition. Please visit www.msfineart.com

or email

info@msfineart.com for more information. (212) 879-8815