Untitled (Abstraction)

Date1969

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions64 1/2 × 121 3/4 in. (163.8 × 309.2 cm)

ClassificationsPainting

Object numberUAC60

DescriptionRon Morosan’s long career in the arts began in 1965, with a full scholarship to what is now the College for Creative Studies. In 1967, he switched to Wayne State to pursue his BFA, with a detour to Yale in the summer of ’68 to study with Abstract Expressionist painter Al Held, among others. In 1969, while Morosan was still at WSU, he painted two large untitled canvases; they are indeed abstractions, but the random collection of organic and geometric shapes scattered across both paintings —with their heavy outlines, patterned surfaces, and seemingly naturalistic colors — suggest not sheer expression but a basis in actual objects. The larger painting’s subject could be merely an untidy apartment, the smaller’s a cluttered desktop. (Perhaps the harried students hanging out in Old Main’s second floor lounge, where the paintings now reside, can relate.) These shapes predict the figurative elements in the work Morosan would create later in his career: collage-like images, featuring strange hybrid objects, cartoon-like characters, and quirky captions, that recall both the work of painters Philip Guston and David Salle, and the gag panels of cartoonist Glen Baxter. The “natural sort of whimsy, joyfulness and love of color” the New York Times ascribed to Morosan’s work in 2008 may have its origins in these early paintings.

Text by Sean Bieri

After studying at CCS and Wayne State in the late ‘60s, Ron Morosan received his MA and MFA from the University of Iowa in 1973, and studied art history at the University of Michigan for two years after that. Since 1980 he has taught and lectured at a number of schools and galleries; until 2008, he taught painting and art history at Molloy College in New York. His work has been included in numerous exhibits in the US and Europe, including the occasional stop back in the Detroit area — at CCS, Alley Culture, and elsewhere.