Over a career that spanned four decades, Jack Roth built on his early success in the Abstract Expressionist movement to cultivate a remarkable body of color abstract painting. Jack Roth’s (1927 - 2004) art evolved alongside the vanguard of postwar American art through Color Field abstraction and beyond. Roth began his career in art as one of the youngest artists, just 27 years of age, whose work was selected for the landmark Younger American Painters exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which in 1954 helped to introduce Abstract Expressionism to the American public. This exhibition, which traveled to major art museums across the United States, included many leading artists of the day, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, many of whom were decades his elder. Roth’s early works involved densely brushed canvases featuring a highly expressive quality of gesture. With a sense of graphic immediacy and arrangements of fresh, even color, Roth’s later work often incorporated broad shapes of stained matte pigment on unprimed canvas. They often employed an unusual use of line and negative space, sometimes evoking the flat, ‘cutout’ shapes of Matisse’s late paintings. In 1963, Art in America named Roth as the “New Talent” graphic artist upon the recommendation of Museum of Modern Art curators Dorothy Miller and William Lieberman. In 1978, the legendary gallery Knoedler & Co. began their representation of Roth’s work, placing him in a prestigious company of artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Alexander Calder, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline. Roth was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting the following year. In addition to his career in art, Roth was also a longtime professor of mathematics at universities in Kentucky, Florida, and New Jersey, and published two books on calculus. Of his unique career, Roth said, “I am looking for a mathematical explanation of art…. The art of painting is a search for reality; a search for understanding.”Born in Brockway, Pennsylvania in 1927, Jack Roth served in the Army and Air Force before moving to San Francisco in 1949, where he studied at the California School of Fine Arts under Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park. He reenrolled at Pennsylvania State University in 1951 and earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry, an achievement later followed by a Master of Fine Arts from the State University of Iowa in 1952 and a PhD in mathematics from Duke University in 1962. Roth’s works are held in the collections of museums across the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the North Carolina Museum of Art, among others.