Adolph Gottlieb’s Pictographs

Pace Gallery’s upcoming presentation in its East Hampton space will feature eight pictographs by the pioneering New York-based Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. The artist forged a strong connection to the East Hampton creative community in the early 1960s. Running from July 1 to 18, the show includes works created during the 1940s and early 1950s, a period when Gottlieb challenged the accepted norms of painting, and helped set a new direction for American art.

Gottlieb became a fixture on the East End scene after he and his wife, Esther, purchased an East Hampton home in 1960. In the later years of his life and career, the artist worked in an airy painting studio — formerly a carriage house — on his East Hampton property. His works draw from his familiarity with sources as diverse as pre-historic objects, tribal arts, classical European art, and contemporary painting and sculpture. As the curator and art historian Harry Cooper wrote in 2004 on the occasion of an exhibition of the artist’s pictographs at Pace in New York, “what Gottlieb invented in the Pictographs was a machine to process the most diverse sources into a nonhierarchical, decentralized array — a cultural leveling device, a destroyer of distinctions.”

Concurrently on view will be “Thomas Nozkowski,” featuring a selection of richly-colored, never-before seen paintings on paper by the late artist. Pace Gallery is at 68 Park Place, East Hampton. For more details, visit pacegallery.com.