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FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY (Utah, United States, 1919 - Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, 2009). Untitled. Oil on canvas. Work verified by the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The canvas has restorations. Size: 41 x 33 cm; 46 x 38 cm (frame). Frederick Hammersley develops a minimalist work that stands out for its plastic purity and its strong visual impact, derived from the simplicity of the forms and the refined use of a few basic colours, which allow him a singular personal and emotive expressive capacity. He was part of the "Four Abstract Classicists" group (along with Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson and John McLaughlin), recognised as an important factor in putting West Coast abstraction on the map and as a notable counterpoint to Abstract Expressionism, then especially prominent on the East Coast. His paintings were featured in 1959 in an exhibition of the same name (Four Abstract Classicists), a show curated by the critic Jules Langsner and organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Langsner explained in his catalogue essay that, as self-described "classicists" and in contrast to the "expressionists", these artists aspired to "balance: thought and feeling, intelligence and intuition, reason and emotion". Four Abstract Classicists is also credited with originating the term "hard-edge painting," which Langsner used in the catalogue to describe the artists' use of flat, coloured forms applied to canvas with sharply defined edges. Abstract Classicism shared with Abstract Expressionism and other types of painting of the time a focus on abstraction and the modernist attitude towards flatness of surface, absence of illusion, and purity and independence of the pictorial medium. Hammersley's experiments with abstraction evolved into his "hunch" paintings, some of which were included in the "Four Abstract Classicists" exhibition, and which completely eliminated all representational imagery. Starting with a shape for which he intuitively chose a colour, he proceeded to complete the work by adding shapes and colours by "feel" or "hunch". In the late 1950s and early 1960s Hammersley moved on to works composed almost exclusively of circles and straight lines and evolving more obviously from the shape of the canvas: the hard-edged geometric paintings for which he became best known. Unlike the "hunch" paintings, the "geometric" ones developed from linear compositions and colour schemes systematically tested in sketchbooks. As Hammersley continued to explore the possibilities of his geometric paintings in the 1960s, the first phase of "organic" paintings emerged. Unlike the "geometric" ones, the compositions of these paintings consisted of organic forms drawn by hand directly onto a chipboard panel with pencil or charcoal and painted with a brush in unmodulated flat colour. Hammersley experimented with a wide range of techniques throughout his long career, including sculpture, graphic design, lithography, silkscreen and collage. From the mid-1990s onwards, a renewed interest in Hammersley's work, as well as in the cultural environment in which avant-garde painting was formed, led to a series of major exhibitions and commercial success he had enjoyed only intermittently during his career. In 1973 he received a Guggenheim fellowship for painting, and in 1975 and 1977, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Between 1999 and 2000 his touring exhibition Visual Puns and Hard-Edge Poems: Works by Frederick Hammersley was shown at the Museum of Fine Arts (Santa Fe), the University of New Mexico and the Laguna Art Museum (California). In 2007 the Pomona College Museum of Art organised the retrospective Hunches, Geometrics, Organics: Paintings by Frederick Hammersley. He is currently represented in major international museums. In Spain his work can be seen at the MACBA in Barcelona.