NEW YORK, NY.- Del Deo & Barzune announces the opening of Altered States: The Etchings of Richard Pousette-Dart.

Pousette-Dart’s first engagement with printmaking dates back to 1937, but it was not until 1979 when he began to delve more deeply into the medium. At the Rockland Foundation, not far from his home and studio in Suffern, New York, Pousette-Dart worked alongside master printmaker Syliva Roth, who is known to have also trained John Chamberlain and Stephen Greene. Under Roth, Pousette-Dart honed his skills in the time-honored methods and techniques of intaglio etching. In so doing, he discovered as much about the etching process as he did the possibilities for transforming initial etching “states” through the later applications of other media such as paint, graphite, and ink. Revision and modification were integral, if not defining, to Pousette-Dart’s practice on the whole so it would come quite naturally to the artist to approach etching, a process known for the production of uniform impressions of a single image or composition, not as an end in itself but, rather, as a starting point from which he could further exercise his restless impulse for experimentation and the reach of his expansive vision.

Altered States: The Etchings of Richard Pousette-Dart marks the first in-depth presentation of the artist’s work in the medium of etching. Organized in cooperation with the estate of the artist, the exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue which includes an essay by Charles H. Duncan, Executive Director of the Richard Pousette-Dart Foundation. Works in the exhibition comprise both pure and altered-state examples with plates (or image areas) measuring from 8 x 10 inches to approximately 18 x 24 inches.

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) had his first solo exhibition at the Artists’ Gallery (New York) in 1941. He went on to have solo shows with Marian Willard, Peggy Guggenheim, and Betty Parsons (beginning in 1948). The artist received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951, a Ford Foundation Grant in 1959, and an Individual Artist Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1967. In 1965, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Bard College, and in 1981, the Tiffany Foundation awarded him the Distinguished Lifetime in Art Award.

Solo exhibitions of Richard Pousette-Dart’s work have been organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1963, 1974, 1998); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1969–70); Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1986); Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana (1990); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1997); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2001, traveled); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and Cincinnati Art Museum (2006); Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007); The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2010); Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Germany (2013); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania (2014); Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art, Utica, New York (2014); and The Drawing Center, New York (2015).