Anomaly Blue

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Artist/Maker Alex Hay (American, born 1930)

Date2006

MediumSpray acrylic on linen

DimensionsOverall: 67 7/8 × 36 1/2 × 1 3/8 in. (172.4 × 92.7 × 3.5 cm)

Credit LineGift of E. M. Bakwin, Class of 1950

Object number2012.3.7

Not on view

DescriptionBetween 1962 and 1964, Alex Hay was a member of the Judson Dance Theater in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he, like his fellow artist and friend Robert Rauschenberg, created and participated in avant-garde performances alongside trained and untrained dancers. He was also a Pop artist whose paintings featured mundane objects such as chicken wire and a waitress’s order pad and whose fiberglass sculptures replicated brown paper bags and folded paper airplanes on a magnified scale. Hay’s work became increasingly conceptual over the course of the 1960s. In 1969, he left New York City for Arizona and did not return to painting for over three decades. In 2007, he presented a new body of work—six paintings, including Anomaly Blue—at the New York gallery Peter Freeman Inc., his first solo exhibition in thirty-eight years. Anomaly Blue is one of a series of canvases Hay created between 2003 and 2007 that fastidiously depict scraps of wood he saved when renovating his residence—an old hotel in Bisbee, Arizona, where he still lives. The artist made stencils based on his own pencil renderings and used spray paint—not brushes—to build up the images over many months. Between layers of paint, he abraded the surface to add texture and depth and to convey the wear of the actual wood. The canvases, which the New York Times critic Roberta Smith called “found abstractions,” interrogate the relationship between figuration and abstraction. As in his Pop period, Hay has chosen subject matter that is typically rendered invisible by its banality. Moreover, in both the earlier and the current works, a tension exists between automation, or mass production, and the handmade. By choosing to use stencils and spray paint, he seems to remove the artist’s hand from the creation of the work of art; however, by basing the stencils on his own drawings and manipulating the paint to create surface texture, he challenges that idea. (SOURCE: Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS, 2017)

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Additional Details

Exhibition History 2017
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College). "Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection," September 9 - December 10, 2017 (cat. no. 125, illus.);

2012-13
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art). "Affinity Atlas," October 6, 2012 - April 7, 2013 (brochure);

2007
New York, NY (Peter Freeman, Inc.). "Alex Hay: New Paintings," June 20 - July 27, 2007 (cat., illus., 61).

Provenance 2012: Hamilton College (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art), by gift of E.M. Bakwin;
? - 2012: E.M. Bakwin, purchased from Peter Freeman Inc., New York
2007: Peter Freeman Inc., New York, from the artist.

Markings Label: Peter Freeman label with tombstone info on verso affixed to center stretcher bar.

Published References Katherine D. Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS: THE RUTH AND ELMER WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART AT FIVE YEARS, HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION (Clinton, NY: Wellin Museum of Art, 2017), p. 272;

Johanna Burton. "Alex Hay," ARTFORUM (October 2007): 371-372, illus., 372.

Roger White, "Alex Hay: New Paintings," THE BROOKLYN RAIL (September 2007): illus., 61.

Stephen Maine, "Weathered Wood and Churning Crowds," NEW YORK SUN (July 28 2007): 21.

Roberta Smith,"Alex Hay: New Paintings," NEW YORK TIMES (July 20 2007).

Signature "Alex Hay 06" on verso at upper left in black marker.

Inscribed "Anomaly Blue" on verso at upper left in black marker.