Opening reception Thurs, Sept 17, 6-8pm, exhibition September 12 - October 31, 2026, Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00am - 5:30pm
Modernism presents "James HAYWARD: Works 1975-2013," the first survey of the artist's work following his passing earlier this year. Bringing together paintings spanning nearly four decades, from the formal "Automatic Paintings" of the late 1970s to the densely worked monochromes of his mature practice, the exhibition examines Hayward's sustained investigation of color, surface, gesture and the material possibilities of paint.
For more than fifty years, Hayward pursued the monochrome not as a restrictive format but as a field of inexhaustible variation. His earliest monochromatic works were deliberately restrained: flat, single-hued canvases in black, gray and dark green whose surfaces resisted evidence of the artist's hand.
Working in Southern California, Hayward developed his practice in dialogue with the reductive tendencies of the Los Angeles art scene, including Minimalism and the L.A. Fetish Finish aesthetic. Yet where L.A. Fetish Finish prized immaculate surfaces, Hayward increasingly emphasized the physical presence of the artist's hand, a distinction that became especially pronounced as his paintings grew more gestural and heavily impastoed.
The works gathered in "James HAYWARD: Works 1975-2013" trace this pursuit from quiet optical fields to paintings whose surfaces project outward in dense accumulations of paint. Seen together, they reveal less a sequence of stylistic departures than the sustained elaboration of a single question: how much can happen within the ostensibly narrow boundaries of one color and one surface? For Hayward, the monochrome was not an endpoint but a structure capable of continual reinvention.
THE PUBLIC IS INVITED TO AN OPENING RECEPTION THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 6-8PM
Free
Presented by MODERNISM INC..