“(Gentry) celebrates his joy in living with lust pigments that swing across his canvas in a swirling activity. In his sensual enthusiasm for the drama of color and of life, everything in the works appears to be vibrating with a sonority that comes not so much from actual visual experience, but rather from an assimilation of many, many things both seen and felt and imagined.”

Romare Bearden

Larsen Warner highlights a selection of works by the American artist Herbert Gentry (b. 1919 Pittsburgh, PA - d. 2003 Stockholm, Sweden) Gentry was an expressionist painter whose gesturally abstract works were influenced and shaped by the international career he led. Gentry’s dynamic and free flowing compositions are characterised by vividly gestural mark-making that imply calligraphic roots. The surface of Gentry’s paintings are built on swirling lines made up of quick dashes and elongated strokes. The overlapping forms, fused by line and colour are occasionally punctuated and morphed with figures, reminiscent of Picasso’s abstractions and the so-called “primitive” western African masks that inspired him.

Born July 17, 1919 in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, he was raised in Harlem during the dynamic period of the Harlem Renaissance. He was drafted as a soldier in the 1940s at the outbreak of the Second World War, and first arrived in Paris in 1944. He studied at the Sorbonne and later the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he eventually taught. In the late 1950s, his career shifted to Copenhagen, where he would establish a base for himself among several prominent jazz circles in Scandinavian cities. Following this move, gestural abstraction became his primary style, and his career flourished in Denmark and later in Sweden. He eventually became the first non-Scandinavian to be featured in a major retrospective at the Royal Art Academy in Stockholm in 1975. During this time, his transatlantic career was split between Sweden and New York City’s Hotel Chelsea. He continued to be implicated in the city’s vibrant jazz circles, and this musical impulse is reflected in the lyrical nature of his art. Gentry’s presence in the New York City art world came with increased American curatorial attention from the 1980s on. In 1996, he was included in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s important exhibition, Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris 1945-1965.

Gentry’s work is featured in numerous prominent museum collections, including the Amos Rex, Finland; Basel Kunstmuseum, Switzerland; Brooklyn Museum, NY; de Young Museum, California Fine Arts Museums, CA; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Moderna Museet, Sweden; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Spain; National Gallery of Modern Art, India; National Museum, Sweden; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian, Washington DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; St. Louis Art Museum, MO; Smithsonian, American Art Museum, Washington DC; Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, CT.