James HaywardWorks 1975-2013

A survey of the late Southern California painter’s monochromes, from 1970s Automatic Paintings to thick impasto.

Hayward, who died earlier this year, spent five decades making single-color paintings, and this first posthumous survey covers nearly forty years of them. Flat early canvases in black, gray and dark green give way, after a 1982 fellowship in Japan, to heavily worked surfaces of oil and wax.

The earliest works include two Automatic Paintings of 1975–79, among them a large black-and-white triptych, from the years when he was included in the 1977 “Less is More” exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York.

Full details at modernisminc.com