Fine Art

Reclusive Artist C. Louis Blank Returns From a 30-Year Hiatus With a New York Show

Ashton

April 26, 2024 2 Mins Read

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Reclusive Artist C. Louis Blank Returns From a 30-Year Hiatus With a New York Show

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By the early 1990s, Charles Blank, also referred to as C. Louis Blank (b. 1948) was experiencing tremendous traction in the art world, when he stepped away.

A Louisiana native, he received his M.F.A. from the Louisiana State University in 1978, and throughout the 1980s was the subject of several successful exhibitions—including a show at the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art (NOMA) in 1980 and the Huntsville Museum of Art in 1985. In 1987, his work was acquired by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans.

Blank’s work and practice was set to be seen by a broader national audience with the planning of a show at the New Museum, New York, in the early 1990s. In the lead up to the exhibition, the museum’s founder Marcia Tucker paid Blank a studio visit, following which the artist experienced a mental health crisis. Ultimately, the show did not take shape and it marked the beginning of a decades-long period of isolation, out of the public eye.

Following roughly 30 years of reclusiveness, Blank will return to the art scene with a new solo exhibition, “Ascension,” at Evey Fine Art, opening April 27 and on view through May 9, 2024, at the gallery’s space at Flatiron House, New York.

Blank’s work crosses—and in many ways collapses—the spectrum between figuration and abstraction. Figurative works, such as Portrait (2024), evoke early 20th-century Modernism, specifically expressionism, with the rendering of the sitter being comprised of intuitive, quick strokes and the allusion to the settings elements, such as a curtained window or cat on their lap executed in hazy shades. The work, alongside Blank’s other figurative works, evokes themes of existentialism and conveys the artist’s unease during his isolation.

The passing of his mother in 2010 was in many ways a catalyst for Blank to begin exploring total abstraction, as can be seen in the exhibitions titular work Ascension (2011). The psychologically charged painting is at once full of movement and energy as well as meditative. Blank said, “In my painting, I have renewed an attitude of working fast, not analyzing, and letting a stream of consciousness conduct the story.”