ORLANDO, FL.- A series of six monumental art glass windows designed by the celebrated American abstract painter, Al Held, will be unveiled as part of the dedication of the new George C. Young U.S. Courthouse and Federal Building Annex in Orlando, on Friday, September 21, 2007. The windows, commissioned by the General Services Administration, Art in Architecture Program, and located in the atrium-like lobby of the new courthouse, feature the complex illusionistic geometry that Held (1930-2005) developed in his large-scale paintings. The courthouse, designed by Leers Weinzapfel Associates Architects, Boston, is located at Central Boulevard and Division Street in downtown Orlando.

Held’s paintings encompass aspects of Western art from the Renaissance to his own original pictorial Modernism. He combined the complexity of the Baroque with a personal vision that conceived of imagined dimensions on a vast scale. By translating his painting into colored glass, Held realized, in a parallel medium, the luminosity of color and intricacy of form that distinguished the last period of his work.

The windows, titled Gravity’s Springs I-VI, are startling in the realization of Held’s painted imagery. The largest window, Gravity’s Strings I (50x20 feet), located on the east wall, is a tour de force of solid geometrical shapes that bend and hover in space. The cylinders, rings, and cubes are composed of glowing blocks and detailed grids. The forms float in a space of multiple patterns and tilting perspectival planes. At the window’s top are blue serpentine shapes that writhe against a crazy quilt of rays, lattices, and tri-colored checkerboards. The blue shapes give way to purple and green cylinders and multi-colored rings that reveal new spatial vistas.

The five smaller windows (11x4 feet), which run in regular intervals along the south wall, explore new motifs: massive girders, spirals, and expanses of rippling waves. Energizing all of the windows is the vibrant color, shifting from saturated hues to delicate tonalities, that is central to Held’s work. Constant throughout is the artist’s exuberant invention, building fantastic imaginative space from the rational architecture of two-dimensional illusion.

For the window project, Held created a suite of large, highly-detailed preparatory watercolors. The watercolors were photographed and the their individual shapes were mapped on a computer, serving as the matrix for the cutting of over 100,000 individual pieces of colored glass. Since Held died in 2005, the colors were chosen by the Al Held Foundation, which oversaw the entire project through to its completion. The windows’ inlayed laminated glass panels were fabricated by Architectural Glass Art of Louisville, KY, using the new water-jet process for cutting glass. The cutting and assembly of the pieces, which were bonded to shatter-proof glass and joined with a special epoxy that leaves a grout line as thin as a pencil line, was done by Meixia, in Xiamen, China. The glass was specially blown for the project in over 200 colors, by Lamberts, in Waldsassen, Germany.

Held’s career began in Paris in the 1950s on the G.I. Bill, where he absorbed the lessons of Abstract Expressionism. In San Francisco and then New York, his work transformed into a tough, painterly geometry. His powerful hard-edge works of the 1960s were followed by the black and white linear forms of the 1970s. Held’s rejection of reductivism in those paintings opened up the possibilities of the rich, final phase of his work.

His public projects include those for the Jacksonville, Florida Public Library, the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, Albany New York, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, New York, New York, and the Social Security Administration’s Mid-Atlantic Program Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Held’s paintings are in the collection of major museums in the United States and abroad. The artist’s work is represented by Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco and Waddington Galleries, London.