Clinton Hill was an American abstract artist working across paint, gouache, collage, printmaking and drawing. His style is characterized by an idiosyncratic use of color, the marrying of plane and solid geometry, and a surface tactility that owed much to his pioneering part in the so-called ‘paper revolution’ of the 1970s. The undiscovered bridge between the artist’s darker, expressionist paintings and chaotic collages of the 1950s to his more well-known, minimalist works on paper of the 1970s, Hill’s works of the 1960s embody an invested and controlled precursor to invigorating colors and compositions that would explode again later in his life. These paintings and works on paper, a recently rediscovered body of work, harken to the development of color-field painting and the historical intersection of Pop-Art and minimalism.
Though considered a lesser known member of the New York School, Hill’s work is held in notable public collections globally, including British Museum, London, UK; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; V&A, London, UK; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY and Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ. The Georgia Museum of Art held a major survey exhibition of the artist’s work in 2018.
