Since the 1960s Helène Aylon has produced a prodigious and diverse body of work arising from her lifelong engagement in spiritual and societal concerns. Her abstract, process-driven works created during the 1970s are imbued with meanings that transcend their formal inventiveness and considerable aesthetic presence.
Our presentation includes works from the Elusive Silver series (1969–73), made with industrial materials such as sheet metal, acrylic plastic, and spray paint. They reflect and refract an inner glow, changing visually with the viewer's stance and the light conditions in which they are seen. These perceptual changes anticipated her next two series in which she created works intended to physically change with the passage of time: Paintings That Change in Time (1973–76) and Pouring Formations (1977). In contrast to the simultaneous formlessness and physicality of the Elusive Silver works, these were powerful graphic statements made using simple materials: linseed oil on paper, mounted onto Masonite panels and glazed with Plexiglas. The critic Peter Schjeldahl described them as having an "imagistic rhetoric at once physical and metaphysical."
Helène Aylon introduced performance to process in her last series of the decade, the monumentally-scaled Breakings (1977–79). Made during public events, she poured several quarts of linseed oil onto large sheets of paper affixed to Masonite panels, leaving them in place while the oil developed a skin. The "breaking" occurred several weeks later when the artist, with several collaborators (Betty Parsons, Nancy Spero and Hannah Wilke, among them), lifted the panels, allowing the oil to escape. The resulting works were Aylon's most explicitly Feminist statements of the time referring to childbirth with their enduring (and changing) images suggesting the female body. Our presentation will include video documentation of Aylon's Breaking performance at 112 Greene Street, New York, organized by the legendary gallerist Betty Parsons in 1979.
Helène Aylon was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York and raised within the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Boro Park. Married to a rabbi at the age of eighteen, she became widowed with two young children at the age of thirty. While in her mid-twenties, she enrolled as an art major at Brooklyn College, taking classes with Ad Reinhardt who became her friend and mentor and arranged for a studio visit with Mark Rothko, a transformative event for the young artist.
Aylon has participated in one-person and group shows in museums and galleries throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel, and has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards.
Works by the artist are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Oakland Art Museum the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Morgan Library and Museum, and those of many other distinguished institutions and private individuals.

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