Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present John Altoon: Drawings, an exhibition featuring a selection of the artist’s works on paper from the 1960s. Altoon was consumed by drawing, creating frenetic lines that defined his compositions.

Central to his practice, drawing was not only a primary mode of expression but the language through which he worked most fluently. In the final years of his life, and in the works he made up until his sudden death from a heart attack in 1969 at the age of 43, Altoon focused almost exclusively on drawing, using paper, airbrush, ink, and pastels.

After studying art in Los Angeles, John Altoon relocated to New York from 1951 to 1955, where he engaged deeply with the Abstract Expressionist circle of the New York School—a formative experience he ultimately chose to leave behind. Following a year in Europe, where encounters with Surrealism left a lasting impression, Altoon returned to Los Angeles, painting subjects he often pulled from his dreams and fantasies. By the early to mid-1960s, he shifted away from gestural painting and fully devoted himself to drawing, creating large-scale, hazy, spectral works on paper charged with psycho-sexual imagery and inseparable from his inner life.

John Altoon (b. 1925, Los Angeles, CA; d. 1969, Los Angeles, CA) was a seminal presence in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Once described by Irving Blum, the former owner of Los Angeles’ famed Ferus Gallery, as “dearly loved, defiant, romantic, highly ambitious and slightly mad...incredibly gifted and absolutely brilliant,” Altoon was the consummate maverick among a generation of maverick Los Angeles artists.

Altoon studied at the Otis Art Institute from 1947-1949, the Art Center College of Design from 1947-1950, and the Chouinard Art Institute in 1950, all in Los Angeles. During his lifetime, he exhibited at the Ferus Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Nicholas Wilder, (Los Angeles, CA), and Quay Gallery (San Francisco, CA). Posthumous museum exhibitions have been held at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, (La Jolla, CA); and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (CA); among others. In 2015, Los Angeles County Museum of Art held a major retrospective of the artist’s work. Altoon was featured in eight venues of The Getty Center’s inaugural Pacific Standard Time initiative (2011-2012).

Altoon’s work is held in numerous institutional collections including: Tate Britain (London, UK); Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA); Museum of Contemporary Art, (Los Angeles, CA); Art Institute of Chicago (IL); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); and Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, CA); among others.