Ray Parker American, 1922-1990

Raymond Parker was born in Beresford, South Dakota, and studied painting at the University of Iowa. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1948. Parker began his professional career as an art instructor at the University of Minnesota and in 1955 began his tenure at Hunter College in New York, where he remained until his retirement. In the late 1950s, Raymond Parker arrived at a radically pared-down mode of painting the artist referred to as “Simple Paintings.” Emerging before Minimalism was fully articulated, these works anticipate the movements’ emphasis on reduction, clarity, and the primacy of visual experience. Moving away from the gestural density of Abstract Expressionism, Parker reduced his compositions to a few softly contoured shapes of luminous color suspended against an off-white ground. The resulting images emphasize relationships between hues, density, transparency, and weight. At a moment when many artists pursued either expressive gesture or hard-edged geometry, Parker’s work proposed an alternative that anticipated the clarity and focus of Color Field painting.