Alfred Jensen

Alfred Jensen (Alfred Julio " Al " Jensen, born December 11, 1903 in Guatemala City, Guatemala, † April 4, 1981 in Livingston in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, USA), was an American painter. He was one of the most important representatives of Abstract Expressionism, the New York School. He is known for his painted networks of tiny, colorful triangles and squares, which he had painted in thick impasto.

Life

Jensen was maternal and paternal Danish German descent. He spent his youth in Denmark and was interested in already as a teenager for drawing. After school, Jensen worked first as a sailor and traveled to California and Guatemala. In 1924 he moved to San Diego. He received a scholarship and studied from 1924 to 1925 at the San Diego Fine Arts School in Eugene De Vol In 1926, Jensen moved to Germany and studied until 1928 with Hans Hofmann in Munich at the Art Academy. In the years 1929-1937 he undertook extensive study trips to Paris, by numerous European cities and North Africa. In 1937 he settled in New York City. He had in 1938 an important meeting for him with Andre Masson that was to mark him artistically.

Alfred Jensen's first solo exhibition was in 1952 at the John Heller Gallery in New York. Initially, Jensen still painted gestural expressionistic and then finally found from the year 1957 to its own style of painting in the Geometric abstraction, which he created in pure spectral colors. The theoretical foundations of his paintings were based on an intensive study of color theory by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and in dealing with the writings of Leonardo da Vinci. Jensen, grappled with various number systems and mathematical theories. He thematized the Mayan Calendar and the theories of Michael Faraday in his painting. During these years he undertook again study trips to Mexico, Peru, Guatemala and Brazil. In the 1960s he painted mainly serial images.

Al Jensen has had solo exhibitions in 1961 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and in 1964 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In the same year, his works at the documenta in Kassel III were shown in the painting department. He was also in 1968 and 1972 to the 4th documenta called to documenta 5 as a participant. 1973 organized the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, a solo exhibition, which was shown at the Kunsthalle Baden -Baden, at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf and at the Kunsthalle Bern in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk (Denmark ). In 1979 he was represented at the Biennale of São Paulo. 2001 showed the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, the exhibition Alfred Jensen: Concordance.

His works are part of public collections, the Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.