Gas-Up
Alan Shields American
Not on view
One of a series of intricate prints titled with various hyphenated compound nouns, Gas-Up celebrates its multipart makeup. A layered lattice of grids, typical of Shields’s work and drawn from the geometry of 1960s Minimalism, amasses a thicket of pattern and texture. Shields was often associated with the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement, which sought to democratize American art by aligning itself with various craft and decorative traditions. Visible machine stitching and dangling threads (skeletal cores of the paper pulp grids) echo Shields’s frequent use of a sewing machine to construct his work, while the stenciled and boldly colored patterning evokes an international vocabulary of textiles, such as the wax prints popular in West Africa.
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