Eva Slater whom this gallery exclusively represents, was a core member of the Hard-edge art movement that took place in the 1950's and 60's. She was born in Berlin, Germany in 1922 and studied art there until the outbreak of WWII. After the war she moved to the United States where she worked as a fashion illustrator in New York City. After meeting her husband, John Slater, they moved to Los Angeles, California, and it was there that she met Harry Carmean, Lorser Feitelson and Feitelson's wife, Helen Lundeburg. Feitelson was the founder of the Hard-edge art movement which begun in the 1950's in Los Angeles.
Slater's hard edge paintings are characterized by smooth, meticulously painted surfaces, spare, simplified form and elegant, subtle color schemes, reminiscent of Helen Lundeburg. Although she was adept at drawing the figure she preferred painting landscape and astronomical subjects, as well as creating purely abstract works. Her unique contribution to the Hard-edge movement was the use of intricate small triangles that would flow across the painting in irregular patterns. She referred to them as being much like "cells" which interlocked and helped to define the structure of the painting. The triangles concept was abandoned in the early sixties and she went on to make a small number of pure hard edge landscapes with large areas of flat color. She stopped painting in the late 1960's and became a scholar and collector of American Indian bastetry, writing the book Panamint Shoshone Baskety, an American Art Form. (available through this gallery)
For more information and photos about Eva Slater visit evaslater.com and the Eva Slater blog.
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