Alan Lynch, Bristol Bush ⏤ detail, 1960
Alan Lynch
b. 1926 in San Francisco, CA, USA
d. 1994 in San Francisco, CA, USA
d. 1994 in San Francisco, CA, USA
Alan Lynch is, today, perhaps the least well known of the cadre of artists who formed around the early iteration of the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Included in exhibitions with Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ken Price and Craig Kauffman in the late 1950s, by the end of the 1960s Lynch had retreated from exhibiting his work in public, pursuing instead a devotional Buddhist practice of which his art was a form of meditation and prayer.
Lynch first studied ceramics at the University of Mexico, in Mexico City. During the Second World War, he was stationed in Japan, and had developed an interest in Japanese pottery and Zen Buddhism. In Los Angeles, he later studied art history at UCLA, where he was introduced to Zenga calligraphy. His early paintings were near monochromes, in oil on canvas, which, the more attention one paid to them, revealed themselves to be generous and subtle fields of energetic mark-making.
Installation view, The Disappearance of Rituals, Château Shatto, 2023.
Courtesy Alan Lynch Estate and Château Shatto
Lynch subsequently moved towards watercolours on paper, describing hard-edged forms that seemed to derive from nature – biomorphic shapes, flowers, aquatic life, landscapes. He increasingly understood his creation of these works as a devotional practice in itself and, as the sacred aspect of his work became more central, he turned away from the commercial artworld, refusing to place these pieces in gallery exhibitions.
Lynch’s influence on his peers was significant; his oeuvre remains an important and under-recognized contribution to the deep and profound engagement in Californian modernism with Eastern thought.
Alan Lynch, Piccadilly, 1964, oil on canvas
Courtesy Alan Lynch Estate and Château Shatto
Patricia Faure, The Ferus Gang, 1962
Left to right: John Altoon, Craig Kaufmann, Alan Lynch, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston
Courtesy Château Shatto
Left to right: John Altoon, Craig Kaufmann, Alan Lynch, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston
Courtesy Château Shatto
We thank Château Shatto for their kind collaboration on the group show Once The Block Is Carved, There Will Be Names.