‘Ed Clark: The Big Sweep, Chronicles of a Life, 1926–2019’ offers a vivid portrait of the artist through never-before-seen photos, letters, and ephemera, along with reprints of historical texts and interviews.

Exploring Clark’s under-examined place in prevailing narratives of art history, the publication will demonstrate the central role he played in the pivotal developments of American abstraction.

The book features interviews with Ed Clark by Quincy Troupe, Jack Whitten, and Judith Wilson.

Published with Hauser & Wirth.

Published on occasion of the exhibition ‘Ed Clark: The Big Sweep’, 07 Sep – 21 Oct 2023, Hauser & Wirth New York.

Extract from Hauser & Wirth website on the artist:

“Born in New Orleans in 1926 and raised in Chicago, Clark emerged in the 1950s as a pioneer of the New York School. Over the course of seven decades, his experimentations with pure color, abstract form, and the seductive materiality of paint have yielded an oeuvre of remarkable originality, extending the language of American abstraction. Clark’s breakthroughs have an important place in the story of modern and contemporary art: in the late 1950s he was the first American artist credited with exhibiting a shaped canvas, an innovation that continues to reverberate today. His search for a means to breach the limitations of the conventional paintbrush led him to use a push broom to apply pigment to canvas laid out on the floor. Defying the discreet categories of gestural and hard-edged abstraction, Clark has masterfully interwoven these approaches into a unique form of expressionism.”