Al Held 's solo exhibition  at the White Cube in Paris.

White Cube Paris is pleased to present a solo exhibition of watercolors by Al Held (1928–2005). They form an important part of Held's exploration of form, color, and space.
Joyfully chromatic, many employing a warm palette, Held's watercolors form a distinct body of work, demonstrating how he positioned the discipline alongside painting; they were a space where he could freely formulate ideas and purposefully advance his imagery. This group of works was painted exclusively in Italy, where he maintained a studio from the late 1980s onward following his prestigious residency at the American Academy in Rome. During his time in Italy, Held engaged in an intensive study of Renaissance painting, aiming to broaden his vocabulary for his increasingly complex and monumental paintings.

Produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Held's Italian watercolors—like the paintings of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, and Michelangelo he so admired—are suffused with light, appearing almost translucent, as if illuminated from within. More profoundly, watercolor offered Held a way to fill his images with light, lifting his solid forms into a weightless mass.
Held was able to channel the past and the future in these luminous, visionary works. As Barbara Rose wrote:  "In the landscape where the Renaissance was born, [Held] drew and redrawn paradoxical, contrasting forms floating in an infinite, unexplored space . "

Al Held was born in Brooklyn in 1928 and died in Todi, Italy, in 2005. He exhibited widely throughout his career, including solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1966); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC (1968); ICA, Philadelphia (1968); Museum of Contemporary Arts, Houston (1969); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974); and ICA, Boston (1978), among other museums. He produced significant public artworks in major cities across the United States, including Philadelphia, Washington DC, New York, and Orlando. Held's work is in many museums and public collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Kunstmuseum, Basel.

The Al Held Watercolors exhibition , at one of the most renowned art galleries in Palermo , will be inaugurated on April 18, 2023 and will remain open to the public until May 27, 2023.