Galerie Dina Vierny is pleased to announce its representation of American painter Charles Pollock (1902–1988), a leading figure in Color Field painting who is currently undergoing a rediscovery. This collaboration will culminate in the artist’s first solo exhibition in January 2026 at the gallery’s new space at 53 rue de Seine.
This first exhibition will be devoted to works from the 1950s and 1960s, and more specifically to the “Black and Gray” and “Rome” series. This event will mark a new stage in the rediscovery in France of one of the major painters of postwar American abstraction, whose work, both sensitive and structured, engages in dialogue with the major currents of American modernism.
“Born in 1902, the eldest of his siblings and of his brother Jackson Pollock, Charles Pollock spent his childhood between Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, and California. In 1922, he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked at the Los Angeles Times while studying art at the Otis Art Institute. It was during this period that he developed his taste for the work of Mexican artists, especially the muralists such as Orozco and Rivera. He left Los Angeles in 1926 to continue his studies in New York with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League.
In his approach to abstraction, Charles Pollock is a tonal painter for whom light, its variations, its ability to become muted in a singular alliance with darkness, takes precedence over color, which seems subject to those variations, rendering it at times radiant and, more often in the period considered here, almost smothered. How, despite their titles, can we name the dominant tones of the “Black and Gray” works, or of the “Rome” paintings – gray, mauve-gray, blue-gray? – A matte, almost twilight veil obscures our ability both to see and to articulate what we are seeing.
American, abstract, playing with light in its relationship to color, creating forms that seem to radiate beyond their formal boundaries… It took little more for him to be regarded as one of the representatives of the Color Field painting movement, and a relative, if not of his brother, then of a Clyfford Still or a Mark Rothko.” Pierre Wat
A catalogue will be published featuring texts by art historian and critic Pierre Wat and by Francesca Pollock.
© Text and Photo Courtesy of Dina Vierny
