MAMAMITA

John Seery (born 1941) is an American artist who is associated with the lyrical abstraction movement. He was born in Maspeth, New York, was raised in Flushing, Queens, and as a teen, moved to Cincinnati, Ohio.

Seery studied at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio from 1959 to 1963 then continued his studies at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Ohio State University in Columbus. He moved back to New York City in 1964 and remained there until 1978, when he moved to Plymouth, Massachusetts. He was on the faculty of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston and was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University during the 1980s. In 1990, he moved to Hawaii, where he lived and worked until 2003. He currently lives in Florida. In 2010 Katie Donoghue interviewed John Seery for WhiteWall Magazine. When asked about his association with the Lyrical Abstraction Movement, he had this to say: “This period was not an act of contrivance by the artists. The name came from a collector named Larry Aldrich. Many at the time thought Lyrical Abstraction was reaction against some previous form of painting, but it was an affirmation of painting. Rather than attacking the painting from the outside, it was more of an entering into or inhabiting the painting.”

Mamamita, a 57.5 x 52-inch acrylic on canvas, painted in 1975 is a prime example of the post Abstract Expressionist aesthetic Seery captured while following through on the sediments of the Ab Ex movement.

Seery’s Lyrical Abstraction was a type of freewheeling abstract painting that returned to various forms of painterly, pictorial, expressionism with a predominate focus on process, gestalt, and repetitive compositional strategies in general.

Image: John Seery | Mamamita, 1975 | Acrylic on canvas | 57.50 x 52 in