ALCOPLEY

Alcopley - untitled

Artist Biography

1910-1992

Alfred Lewin Copley was a German-born American scientist and artist who was a leading light in modernist circles in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1949 he was one of twenty artists who founded the Eighth Street Club. The group also included Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Alcopley’s close friend, the composer Edgard Varese. He married the Icelandic Abstract Expressionist Nina Tryggvadottir, whom he met whilst both were taking part in the first two New Art Circle shows.

Alcopley participated in the Ninth Street Show in 1952 and had a solo exhibition at the Stedeljik Museum, Amsterdam in 1962. The couple lived in Paris from 1953, where Alcopley’s work was bought by Sonja Delaunay and they mixed with Soulages, Hartung and other innovators, and London from 1957-59 before returning to New York. Alcopley’s work is held in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and a poster in the MOMA, New York. David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe had a retrospective in 2017-18.

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