This season we present several new and noteworthy exhibitions, including MOTHERWELL SEGAL, STELLA featuring seminal works by three of the most outstanding American artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Many large-scale works were transported from the private collection of Martin Margulies, especially for the exhibition. Margulies has been a collector of all three artists for several decades and this exhibition provides prime examples of each artists work and their contribution to the history of art.

The paintings on view by Robert Motherwell, a leading member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist art, include an early 1958 canvas made the same year as Motherwell’s marriage to painter Helen Frankenthaler. Created prior to their honeymoon in Spain and France, the work anticipates the Iberia series that Motherwell began after the couple attended a bullfight at the Plaza de Toros in Biarritz, France in August 1958.

George Segal, who became prominent during the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, worked directly with the human form. The figures are set in an actual environment: a dive bar with a Budweiser beer neon sign, a New York City subway car, a park bench, and a Depression-era breadline. The figures modeled from Segal’s “ugly friends” are left rough and unfinished resulting in an effect of loneliness, alienation, and mystery, often compared to the paintings of American realist Edward Hopper.

“Frank Stella is a painter we have collected in depth over the fifty years we have been building the Margulies Collection,” says curator Katherine Hinds. In this exhibition, we are presenting a rare look at an early 1961-shaped canvas from his Copper series using industrial paint. These early geometric works are credited with launching the American Minimalist Movement. More of Stella’s work can be seen throughout the state of Florida at educational institutions. Over the course of several decades The Martin Z. Margulies Foundation has donated three large-scale Frank Stella works to the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami; Samuel P. Hart Museum of Art, University of Florida; and the New World Symphony, Miami Beach.

Motherwell: 6 paintings and works on paper, 1958-1981

Segal: 4 sculptures, 1968-1991

Stella: 5 paintings, 1961-2013

Click here for more information on Motherwell, Segal, Stella