Sonja Sekula

The exhibition features approximately 50 paintings and works on paper by artist Sonja Sekula, belonging in particular to her most stable and successful period (mid-1940s to 1963), under the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim and later Betty Parsons. Many of these trace his development alongside friends and mentors of the emerging abstract expressionists. Sonja Sekula served as a bridge between the worlds of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. She was influenced as much by her Expressionist counterparts, embracing their much-loved action painting and graphic gesture, as she was by the influx of major European Surrealist emigrants to the city (figures such as Breton, Gorky, and Ernst).
Moreover, Sekula‘s mark-making, inclusion of text, and appropriation of Native American folk art is particularly evident, paralleling the calligraphic approach and indigenous references of artists such as Mark Tobey and other Indian space painters.