In November 2023, as part of its  Seminal Artists Series, WhiteBox LES is exhibiting a selection of exceptional and rarely seen early bronze works of Abstract Expressionist sculptor Philip Pavia, together with 1970s-to-date abstract paintings by his life-long partner Natalie Edgar, and recent bronze sculptures by their son Paul Pavia. 

This presentation shines a spotlight on the captivating world of Ab-Ex sculpture and painting, maintained continuously and vigorously by a family of gifted members of the downtown New York art scene. What unites these three artists is their shared reverence for deepening the exploration of space, a studious legacy that weaves seamlessly through their works, connecting them in inquiry, process, spirit, composition, materiality, time and light, entranced by a whimsical use of hidden geometries as foil and binder.

The Pavia family's artistic journey is a creative odyssey spanning eighty years. Philip Pavia was an iconic master of the New York School and central figure, thinker and key founder of the 8th Street Artists Club in 1948. Throughout his long career, he placed paramount importance on space and in his deeply researched, inventive possibilities light affords in the construction of sculptural material volume. Inspired particularly by Arshile Gorky’s “Pinwheel”, Pavia utilized “fixed points” in his sculptural technique. His direct hand-crafted wax-to-bronze sculptures from the late 1940s exude a dancer-like grace, expressing vertical abstract compositions that appear to pulsate with an innate sense of spatial awareness and tacit geometry. Philip's intensely personal, ingenious work and authorship, became the cornerstone for a deeper exploration of the family’s artistic aspirations and inventiveness. 

In 1958, after founding and publishing “It Is”, the magazine for abstract art, to quote Amy Sillman in Faux Pas: “Pavia, from the first issue that Spring, concerned about subject matter, shies away a bit from pondering upon timely items such as composition vs construction, instead sets out the central dilemma as something he called “The Problem”, maintaining, the answer lays out in ‘drawing’ not as a sketch, preparation or rehearsal, but as a materialistic form of engagement through which an artist can perform a vanguard of inquiry”.

Natalie Edgar, a formidable painter akin to the Ninth Street Women’s group, brings her own unique vision to the exhibition, offering a captivating display of select 1970s and early 2000s paintings, in which she carries forward her husband's legacy, delving into the realm of surface qualities and utilizing the interplay of recessive and projective color contrasts. The result is a mesmerizing, wholly original non-planimetric signature artwork. 

Enter the next chapter of this artistic saga in which their son Paul Pavia’s spatially hypnotizing sculptures take center stage. He inherits the family's profound understanding of visual aesthetics. His timeless, intimate welded abstract bronzes possess a sequential quality, inviting viewers into an entrancing narrative symphony of oneiric forms, bent planes, and sound emitting shadows.

 This exhibition stands as a testament to the enduring legacy of the Pavia family: a rich tapestry woven from the threads of creativity and a shared inventive artistic vision, dodging ‘style’, based on a profound understanding of how space can be dissected, depicted, and projected, immemorial.

Juan Puntes

Exhibition Curator

October 25, 2023