Abe Ajay
(American, 1919–1998 )
Polychrome Wood Relief No. 212
1964
wood, found objects, paint, 31" x 72"
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The son of Syrian immigrants, Abe Ajay
was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and moved to New York to
study art in 1937, with scholarships to the Art Students League
and the American Artist’s School. There he met the artists
Will Barnet, Robert Gwathmey and also Ad Reinhardt, who became
his life-long friend and confidant. Soon after his initial
exposure to geometric abstraction, the dominant avant-garde
tendency of the time, Ajay joined the Federal Art Project,
and spent the next twenty years working as a graphic designer
and illustrator. While the conceptual groundwork of Ajay’s
art was laid many years before, it was not until the 1950s
that he devoted himself to painting.
In 1963, the chance discovery of a supply of cigar molds in
a Connecticut flea market inspired a series of relief constructions,
of which Polychrome Wood Relief No. 212 is an outstanding example.
In these densely composed wall reliefs, and the modular cast
plastic sculptures and paper collages that followed them, Ajay
combined the highly ordered geometry of Russian Constructivism,
Dutch de Stijl, and neoPlasticism, with the improvised look
of found object sculpture. In a statement published in the
catalogue for a 1969 exhibition at the Tweed Museum of Art,
which coincided with his appearance in Duluth as a Summer Guest
Artist, Ajay wrote that he was “exploring a three-dimensional
vocabulary of pure and private form. Disciplined, motionless
and devoid of anecdote, anguish or lonely mystique.” In
1982. Ajay wrote that his imagery was “strictly architectonic,
free of sentimental reference or autobiographical chit-chat.
It toes no line, promotes no cause, purveys no gossip, and
dispenses no information.”
Ajay clearly described himself as an abstract artist working
purely with form, shape, color and space. While some critics
have noted that Ajay’s relief sculptures at times evoke
the architecture of his Middle Eastern heritage, the strength
of his work was rooted in his ability to combine disparate
formal elements into compositions that appear to be naturally
ordered. |
