Cleve Gray The Polyptychs

Cleve Gray on The Polyptychs:

“The image itself got very tight, and I realized I was trapping myself in my dependence on this one rationalized vertical image. I started the scream performance.”

The screams were a complete letting go, a break with all of his educated, rational, intellectually based work. Thomas B. Hess described the process in an essay he wrote in the catalogue for an exhibition of Cleve’s work at the Albright-Knox Gallery. “He closes his eyes, stoops over, and commences the gestural drawing. And he screams. A wild, crazy howl, like a Zen swordsman or Wu initiate.”

In the studio, Cleve demonstrates that scream for me, that letting out of energy, fear, rage, tension. And then he calmly ads, “That was another year: 1975. I did fifty or seventy-five of the screams.” The painting series were entitled Conjugation or Conjunction.

–Nicholas Fox Weber

 

Conjunction #151, 100 x 70”. Acrylic on canvas.

Krannert Art Museum. University of Illinois, Champaign

 

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