Allan D'Arcangelo, Constellation, 1971

Allan D'Arcangelo

Constellation, 1971 

Acrylic on paper on canvas

Signed and dated 1971 lower front

Measurements:
Framed:
23.75 x 23.75 x 1.25 inches
Artwork:
22 inches x 22 inches
Provenance: Marlborough Gallery, New York (with original label bearing unique inventory number) on the verso

D’Arcangelo’s geometric abstraction, Constellations depict the artist’s most iconic and enduring subject: the road. Constellation is part of a body of work, including works on paper and canvas of varying sizes, that was first presented at New York’s Marlborough Gallery in 1971. Representing a decisive break from the explicitly Pop approach for which D’Arcangelo had been known, the Constellation paintings depict spatially complex arrangements of striped highway barriers against void-like, monochrome grounds. For this Constellation, D’Arcangelo uses a beautiful, burnt-Sienna palette and symmetrical composition to quietly confront viewers with a dazzling array of Escher-esque visual conundrums. Writing in the New York Times, critic Peter Schjeldahl celebrated this body of work, writing that the artist had become “more and more a painter of, if you will, his own spiritual condition.”
About the artist
A major midcentury artist, printmaker, and sculptor, Allan D’Arcangelo (1930–98) was celebrated for his coolly detached depictions of highways, industrial landscapes, and transmission lines. Though associated with American Pop, his work is equally indebted to the tradition of landscape painting. D’Arcangelo’s cold, overtly unnatural portrayals of America’s built environments are at once desolate visions of postwar consumption and connection and oblique meditations on the topography of an accelerating world.
D’Arcangelo’s geometric abstraction, Constellations depict the artist’s most iconic and enduring subject: the road. Constellation is part of a body of work, including works on paper and canvas of varying sizes, that was first presented at New York’s Marlborough Gallery in 1971. Representing a decisive break from the explicitly Pop approach for which D’Arcangelo had been known, the Constellation paintings depict spatially complex arrangements of striped highway barriers against void-like, monochrome grounds. For this Constellation, D’Arcangelo uses a beautiful, burnt-Sienna palette and symmetrical composition to quietly confront viewers with a dazzling array of Escher-esque visual conundrums. Writing in the New York Times, critic Peter Schjeldahl celebrated this body of work, writing that the artist had become “more and more a painter of, if you will, his own spiritual condition.”
Allan D'Arcangelo Biography:
Allan D’Arcangelo was an American painter and printmaker. Born in Buffalo, New York in 1930, D’Arcangelo studied painting in Mexico City from 1957 to 1959 under the G.I. Bill with modernist artist and critic John Golding. D’Arcangelo returned to New York in 1959, and in 1963, his reputation as a seminal Pop artist was solidified with his first solo exhibition in New York’s Fischbach Gallery in which he showed his acrylic paintings of American highways and industrial landscapes. He continued to show throughout the 1960s, and in 1971 just joined Marlborough Gallery.
During the five decades of his career, D’Arcangelo remained true to his unique interpretation of the modern American landscape, creating iconic, large-scale paintings of road signs, highways, and airplanes. D’Arcangelo also taught throughout his career at the School of Visual Arts and Brooklyn College, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988-87. By his death in 1998, D’Arcangelo was the subject of many one-man shows at such influential institutions as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Chicago), as well as in several group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington D.C.), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York), where Pegasus was shown in their 1965-66 exhibition, Around the Automobile.
His work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris); and the Museum Ludwig (Cologne).