Diagrammatic Mysteries

125 Newbury will present Alfred Jensen: Diagrammatic Mysteries, an exhibition of paintings, studies, and works on paper by the influential Expressionist painter Alfred Jensen. Selected from the collection of the Estate of Alfred Jensen, many of the works on view will be publicly exhibited for the first time. Born in 1903, the same year as his close friend Mark Rothko, Jensen is recognized for his enigmatic universe of grids, diagrams, and fantastic calculations rendered in brilliant, prismatic color. Before settling in New York in the early 1950s, Jensen spent much of his young adult life moving from place to place. Strongly influenced by Guatemalan textiles and pre-Columbian art, Jensen also drew inspiration from sources ranging from the intuitive to the theoretical and scientific. James Clerk Maxwell's formulation of electromagnetism and foundational texts like the I Ching, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Color, and J. Eric S. Thompson's Maya Hieroglyphic Writing were key to his art. Though Jensen's grids often take on the familiar appearance of games secreting solutions, these works do not serve as maps toward any unified meaning or objective endpoint. As Donald Judd observed in 1963, 'The theories are important to him and completely irrelevant to the viewer.' Jensen's place in contemporary art is perplexing, and he can be viewed as a link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art.