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Press Release
JACK HALL: PORTRAITS
at ACME Fine Art,
Boston
17 March - 5 May 2012
| Jack Hall was a highly successful industrial designer
and design/builder whose collaborations with stars of the American
Modern Movement such as Ivan Chermayeff, George Nelson, and Charles
& Ray Eames distinguished him as a noteworthy modernist. Recent
recognition for projects like his iconic “Hatch Cottage” (1960) in
Wellfleet, Massachusetts have reminded us all of Hall’s brilliance as a
designer. Hall was however, also a dedicated, serious, life-long
artist. His paintings have been featured at galleries such as the
Cherrystone Gallery in Wellfleet, and on several past occasions at ACME
Fine Art in Boston. In 1997 Hall was honored with a solo exhibition at
the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. On Saturday, 17 March an
exhibition of six of Jack Hall’s seminal portraits will open at the
ACME Fine Art gallery. A reception from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. will be open
to the public. Hall’s portraiture was an important portion of his body of work, and it was a genre that held his interest for the entirety of his life as a painter. A number of the works that comprise the forthcoming ACME Fine Art exhibition were a part of a delightful –often humorous- series of portraits of Hall’s fictionalized ancestors. They will be shown complete with the artist’s biographical notes describing the characters. Other examples in the exhibition are of characters from Hall’s everyday life. For instance, his portrait of the fisherman Manny Zora, portrays one of Provincetown’s most colorful characters cleaning his daily catch. Zora, a fisherman and rum runner during the prohibition days, was famous among artists on the tip of Cape Cod for generously sharing his haul with them. While Hall’s design work was sophisticated, clean, abstract, and decidedly of a Bauhaus sensibility, his painting was much more personal in approach. Hall’s portraits and self-portraits are crusty, scumbled, likenesses that capture important character traits of the individuals, usually conveyed in a simultaneously stylized and unpretentious manner. These are moving, heart-felt works that invite the viewer to imagine the persona behind the face, and to remember the enormously talented force that brought them to life on canvas. JOHN “JACK” HUGHES HALL: PORTRAITS will be on view at ACME Fine Art from 17 March through 5 May 2012. For further information about the artist or gallery events please contact the gallery by phone at 617.585.9551 or e-mail at gallery@acmefineart.com. |