Alfred Jensen

b. Guatemala City, 1903
d. Livingston, NJ, 1981

Alfred Jensen is a painter recognized for his enigmatic universe of grids and diagrams, rendered in brilliant, prismatic color and informed by a spectrum of information, from numerical systems to theology and planetary movements. Jensen was inspired by his wide-ranging studies of systems and philosophies, extending from theories of color and light, mathematics, and scientific formulations to the Mayan calendar, hieroglyphics, Guatemalan textiles, and systems of divination such as the I Ching.

Before settling in New York in the early 1950s, Jensen spent much of his young adult life moving from place to place and working odd jobs on ships and farms. In 1926, he traveled to Munich, Germany, to study under Hans Hofmann, and later at the Académie Scandinave in Paris. These experiences informed his lifelong interest in the philosophies, systems, and global aesthetics which became fundamental to his practice. Throughout his life, Jensen met and collaborated with many already or subsequently influential artists, most notably Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miró, and Allan Kaprow. After his death in 1981, the Guggenheim organized a major retrospective of his work, having held his solo exhibition there in 1961.

Jensen’s work is held in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.