Albert Contreras

Albert Contreras (born 1933) is an artist and painter based in Santa Monica, California known for gestural and geometric abstraction. Contreras painted from around 1960 to 1972, and then stopped painting for 25 years.He resumed painting in 1997. Contreras has donated many of his works to museums and university galleries.

Albert Contreras made his name as a painter in the 1960s while living in Stockholm. There he had five solo exhibitions, and curators from such prestigious institutions as the Moderna Museet, the Malmö Konsthall, and the Göteborgs Konstmuseum secured his works for their permanent collections. In 2013 Marquand Books published a comprehensive book on him with essays by Dave Hickey, Ed Schad, David Pagel, and John Yau. He is represented by Peter Mendenhall Gallery in Los Angeles.

Contreras plays with the interaction of materials, color, and symmetry within geometrically-based abstract compositions. He builds up his surfaces with mounds of acrylic gel and manipulates them with various customized tools.

(http://lagunaartmuseum.org/albert-contreras-2/, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-albert-contreras-at-peter-mendenhall-gallery-20141216-story.html, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-contreras30-2009aug30-story.html)