Following up on the extraordinary reception to Marcia Hafif’s "An Extended Gray Scale (1972–73)", at Unlimited as part of Art Basel in June 2015, Fergus McCaffrey is very proud to present "Marcia Hafif: The Italian Paintings, 1961–1969". This exhibition is the first public opportunity in the United States to assess a body of work vital to an account of American art of the 1960s.
The exhibition will feature almost fifty paintings and works on paper created between 1961 and 1969 in Rome, and it will occupy both floors of the New York gallery space.
Hafif (b. 1929 in Pomona, California) moved to Italy in 1961 for a firsthand encounter with Florentine Renaissance art. However, Rome is where she chose to settle, establish a studio, and make her first mature works among new friends and colleagues such as Carla Accardi, Giulio Turcato, Carmengloria Morales, Franco Angeli, Jannis Kounellis, Pino Pascali, Luciano Fabro, and many more.
In 1964 her first one-person gallery show was presented at Galleria La Salita—together with La Tartaruga, one of the two avant-garde galleries of the early ’60s in Rome. This work, her “Pop Minimal” as she has called it in retrospect, had its inception in Los Angeles where she had developed her working method, that of sitting before a canvas or sheet of paper to wait for an image to appear in her mind. What resulted was a bilaterally symmetrical work using hard-edged shapes and often bright colors.
