The Guardian + Moderne Gallery | Rediscovering Paul Hultberg (1926-2019): Abstract Expressionism in Enamel

This month at Philadelphia’s Moderne Gallery, a pioneer of the American Studio Craft movement gets a long overdue retrospective. Paul Hultberg was a California-born artist, taught by Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, a contemporary of Rauschenberg and and friends with Richard Diebenkorn and John Cage. He was a resident of Gate Hill Cooperative, an experimental and influential artists’ colony in Stony Point, New York.

He became known for his semi-abstract landscapes and unsettling figurative works, but he made his name with his unusual architectural scale enamel works and murals. Part of his studies were at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico City with Jose Gutierrez, a renowned muralist. As well as winning awards and having various exhibitions in the 1950s, his enamelled panels in Busch Gardens, Florida and a 45ft mural in the Pan Am Building, New York, were well received. Burnt Sun, a large-scale work exhibited at Syracuse Ceramic National, was one of his masterpieces.

Rediscovering Paul Hultberg (1926-2019) is curated with Hultberg’s son, Lawrence, and showcases the artist’s full archive from early prints to his groundbreaking enamel work. “We wanted to tell the story of not only Hultberg’s career in enamel,” says Joshua Aibel, co-director of Moderne Gallery, “but also his incredible legacy as a seminal figure in the abstract expressionist movement in America.”

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