William Conlon, "Untitled " , Poster,15th Annual Community Holiday Festival , 1985.

Details

Description

William Conlon (b. 1941)
Poster for the 15th Annual Community Holiday Festival, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, 1985

A … Read more William Conlon (b. 1941)
Poster for the 15th Annual Community Holiday Festival, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, 1985

A vibrant and energetic work of geometric abstraction, this large-scale poster was commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts as part of its prestigious List Art Posters series to mark the 15th Annual Community Holiday Festival.

Against a cool, neutral grey ground, Conlon orchestrates a dynamic interplay of geometric forms: jagged pyramidal shapes in vivid purple and deep blue surge upward from the lower register, while broad ribbon-like arcs in coral red, canary yellow, and turquoise blue sweep across the composition in sweeping curves. Scattered square motifs in blue and yellow animate the background, and two patterned planes — a central grey cross-hatched rectangle and a warm orange-yellow grid in the lower right — introduce contrasting textural density. In the upper right, a dark triangular form bearing a stylised botanical motif in lilac provides a counterweight to the composition's centrifugal energy. A fine elliptical outline, drawn in the thinnest of warm red lines, subtly unifies the disparate elements, suggesting an implied orbital path through the pictorial space. The work is signed by the artist in the lower right margin.

Dimensions
• Sheet: 46¼ × 31¾ in. (117.5 × 80.7 cm)
• Framed: 69 × 46¼ × 1¼ in. (175.3 × 117.5 × 3.2 cm)

Medium and Date
Screenprint (serigraph) in colours, 1985. Signed in pencil lower right.

Provenance
Commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York (List Art Posters series); noted provenance from André Emmerich Gallery Inc., New York.

Historical Context

William Conlon is a New York-based painter, draftsman, and printmaker whose large-scale abstract works came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. He served as Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Visual Arts Department at Fordham University College at Lincoln Center, forging a natural institutional connection with the commissioning body. His work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and he has undertaken significant corporate commissions for IBM, PepsiCo, Chemical Bank, and Saatchi and Saatchi.

The Lincoln Center List Art Posters series, initiated in the 1960s, has historically engaged leading artists — among them Roy Lichtenstein and Marc Chagall — to create special-edition works marking the institution’s annual programming. This 1985 commission is documented in Charles A. Riley II, Art at Lincoln Center: The Public Art and List Print and Poster Collections (New York: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, 1985).

The composition is characteristic of the formal preoccupations of American geometric abstraction in the Reagan era: a high-energy palette, layered spatial ambiguity, and a sophisticated command of the tension between flatness and implied depth that distinguished the most accomplished printmaking of the decade.

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