Albert Contreras (1933-June 17, 2017) was 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..."Then, in 1972, Contreras stopped painting. “I was paintings like a lot of Minimalists at the end of the 60s: reductive,” said Contreres. “We wanted to finish off painting. I painted myself to where I wanted to disappear. And I succeeded! I had come to the end of the line, and it was all over. There was no use for me to paint anymore.”So after moving back to Los Angeles (by way of New York), he shut down his studio and went to work for Santa Monica. For the next 20 years, he was a full-time employee, driving garbage trucks, operating heavy equipment and working as a crewman on a front-end skip loader, resurfacing asphalt streets.After retiring in 1992, Contreras spent five years in therapy. In 1997, he was done with that and went back to painting. “I don’t know exactly how I took up painting again. One day I said, ‘You know, I think I can paint again.’ I picked up exactly where I had left off, making monochrome paintings with little gestures in them. The first paintings I made were nearly 30 years late.”(lagunaartmuseum.org)
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