Diagrammatic Mysteries

125 Newbury is pleased to 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 are being 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 gameboards 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. These experiences informed his lifelong interest in the philosophies, systems, and aesthetics of cultures around the world, which became basic to his art. Strongly influenced by Guatemalan textiles and pre-Columbian art, Jensen also drew inspiration from sources ranging from the intuitive to the theoretical and scientific. 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. While many of the works in Diagrammatic Mysteries have titles that point to their origins or symbols with recognizable meanings, these psychic footholds only go so far in orienting us within the compositions, which are ultimately guided by essential mystery. These challenging works, at once accessible and secret, make us realize that Jensen himself is his greatest mystery. Alfred Jensen: Diagrammatic Mysteries is a reawakening of his extraordinary contributions. His work is held in numerous collections throughout the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Kunsthaus Zürich and Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark; and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth.