Description

Carroll Sockwell was one of the most in-demand artists during the 1970s and 80s, participating in some 80 group shows and more than a dozen solo shows, exhibiting at the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, the Stadtische Galerie in Germany, the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Rice Museum, and other prestigious institutions. Sadly, his career was cut short when he ended his own life, while at that very time he was being celebrated at an extraordinarily well-received retrospective of his work.

Sockwell’s work is instantly recognizable as explorations of form and color, always expressionist but constantly traversing from hard-edged to gestural abstraction and back again.

This work is a geometric construction consisting of three squares surmounting a rectangular bas, executed in oil pastels which nearly but do not quite obscure gestural markings hidden in the blocks.