Alan Uglow, Abstract Painter, Dies at 69

Alan Uglow, an abstract painter of light-filled geometries whose expansive fields, bordered with notched lines, reflected in part his passion for soccer, died on Jan. 20 in Manhattan, where he lived. He was 69.

The cause was complications of lung cancer, said his wife, Elena Alexander.

Mr. Uglow was what is often called a painter’s painter, respected within the art world’s precincts but not well known beyond them.

His intuitive sense of proportion and subtle painterly texture gave his work a clarity that could easily be called classical. His fields of white, outlined and bisected by tapelike lines of strong color, or segmented into wide bands or blocks of color, were indebted to the precision and tactility of Mondrian and the scale and specificity of Minimalism.

Mr. Uglow always played the physical solidity of his efforts against their optical radiance, thickening his stretcher bars so that his paintings protruded farther from the wall, hanging his works close to the ground or even simply leaning them, set on tiny blocks, against a wall.

If his outlined fields brought to mind an abstracted soccer — or, as he would insist, football — field, it was not surprising. A longtime fan of the Chelsea Football Club, Mr. Uglow used a photograph of a regulation coach’s bench — a shedlike structure — on the announcement card of his 1995 exhibition at Gimpel Fils Gallery in London.

His 1998 exhibition in Manhattan at the Stark Gallery in Chelsea included an actual bench, finished in blazing white and equipped with a soundtrack of him and an English friend reading passages about soccer by Nabokov, Camus, Pinter and other writers.

Mr. Uglow also took photographs and exhibited them. One of his favorite subjects was soccer stadiums.

Alan Philip Uglow was born on July 19, 1941, in Luton, England, and began studying art when he was a teenager. He earned a degree in painting and printmaking from the Central School of Art in London in 1962.

Tellingly, his early passions included the spare, attenuated figures of Giacometti.

He moved to New York in 1969 and first displayed his work in 1974 in a group show at the Bykert Gallery, a well known Manhattan redoubt of abstract painting at the time.

In 1978 he made his solo debut in simultaneous shows at the galleries of Mary Boone (paintings) and Susan Caldwell (drawings) on West Broadway in SoHo. He had nine subsequent solo shows in New York, most recently at the Stark Gallery in 2002.

Mr. Uglow exhibited frequently in Europe, including a large survey of his work at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany, last year. A show of his work will open in April at Murray Guy in Chelsea.

Besides his wife, who teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, his survivors include 10 nieces and nephews.

In the early 1980s Mr. Uglow learned the bass guitar and played in a rock band called Hard Labour. The band sometimes accompanied Ms. Alexander as she read from her poetry.


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