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Big Square With Crayon
1992
Shirley Jaffe
Painting
Without turning her back completely on the spontaneous method of her early career in Abstract Expressionism, Shirley Jaffe opted for the geometric abstraction based on dislocation and movement that would henceforth define her work, in which she skilfully amalgamates representational signs. A heterogeneous cross between children’s stickers, Chinese ideograms and Moorish frescoes, her improbable forms relate to no known reality, while yellow, red, blue, black, green are the leitmotifs for an oeuvre obsessed with colour. Based on a perfect command of rhythm, her chromatic improvisations of colours on a white background recall Matisse’s cut-outs or jazzy variations in Stuart Davis style.
Shirley Jaffe
USA
Born in 1923
Born in 1923 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, United States. Died in 2016 in Louveciennes, France.
Shirley Jaffe was an American artist, known for her abstract paintings. Initially associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, she developed a distinctive style in the 1970s marked by geometric compositions in vivid colors. Her work is characterized by a unique language of forms with precise contours, painted in solid color fields, which she refined throughout her career in Paris, where she settled in 1949.
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