Preview our SPRING 2026 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
GREY ART GALLERY/MUSEO DE ARTE CONT ESTEBAN VICENTE/ACCIóN CULTURAL ESPAñOLA
Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente
Foreword by Lynn Gumpert, Ana Martínez De Aguilar. Text by Daniel Haxall, Edward J. Sullivan.
The Spanish-born painter, collagist and sculptor Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) is one of Abstract Expressionism's most independent-minded artists, and yet still among its most neglected figures. Illuminated by a plein-air warmth of color, his Matisse-like paper collages and paintings express an ease of touch, replacing gestural angst with love of materials. Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente provides a major reassessment of Vicente's career, focusing on his collages and assemblage-like sculptures. Alongside essays by Daniel Haxall and Edward J. Sullivan, the volume also includes selections from interviews conducted by Sullivan with Vicente's friends and colleagues Irving Sandler and Elizabeth Frank, as well as with several of his best-known students: Chuck Close, Dorothea Rockburne and Susan Crile.
Featured image, Esteban Vicente's Untitled, 1980, is reproduced from Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente.
"As is the case with other artists of his time, in Vicente we find that avant-garde passion for experimentation which converts his artistic career into a living memory and is the source of new ways of interpreting elements of continuity and of change over the course of our art history. The challenge offered to contemporary memory by his formal constructions derives from his heightened sensibility, which allowed him to crate unsuspected nuances of surface, color, and line. His vision of abstraction, which still fascinates us today, meditates on the great challenges of existence through his dramatic awareness of the play of time and its projection in space."
FORMAT: Pbk, 9 x 10.25 in. / 269 pgs / 101 color / 30 b&w / 30 duotone / 101 tritone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $40.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $50 ISBN: 9788493771904 PUBLISHER: Grey Art Gallery/Museo de Arte Cont Esteban Vicente/Acción Cultural Española AVAILABLE: 9/30/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente
Published by Grey Art Gallery/Museo de Arte Cont Esteban Vicente/Acción Cultural Española. Foreword by Lynn Gumpert, Ana Martínez De Aguilar. Text by Daniel Haxall, Edward J. Sullivan.
The Spanish-born painter, collagist and sculptor Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) is one of Abstract Expressionism's most independent-minded artists, and yet still among its most neglected figures. Illuminated by a plein-air warmth of color, his Matisse-like paper collages and paintings express an ease of touch, replacing gestural angst with love of materials. Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente provides a major reassessment of Vicente's career, focusing on his collages and assemblage-like sculptures. Alongside essays by Daniel Haxall and Edward J. Sullivan, the volume also includes selections from interviews conducted by Sullivan with Vicente's friends and colleagues Irving Sandler and Elizabeth Frank, as well as with several of his best-known students: Chuck Close, Dorothea Rockburne and Susan Crile.
