For 2025 Frieze Masters Spotlight, Inman Gallery is thrilled to present a solo booth by American Modernist Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle, (b. Beatrice, Nebraska 1901– d. Denton, Texas 2002).
Profoundly influenced by images of the works shown in New York’s 1913 Armory Show, LaSelle was an early and intuitive student of modernism. In the 1940s, she sought out and studied with European emigrés László Moholy-Nagy and Hans Hofmann. Moholy-Nagy laid the groundwork for LaSelle’s interest in geometry and shapes, while Hofmann’s color theories influenced her space compositions. In New York and Provincetown in the late 1940s through the early 1960s, LaSelle was a witness to and participant in the American Modernist revolution. Working closely with the LaSelle Foundation, we have selected paintings and works on paper, including watercolor, ink and oil pastel, to present the range of LaSelle’s exploration of form, color and structure, beginning with the late 1940s, but focusing on the 1960s.
From 1928–1972, LaSelle taught art and design at a university in North Texas, while simultaneously exposing herself to the burgeoning concepts and processes of modernism. During sabbaticals and summers, she traveled variously to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Provincetown, MA to study. Provincetown became LaSelle’s second home, with the majority of works in the estate holdings produced during summers in rented studios in this important artists’ colony.
Our Frieze stand features 4 paintings and 15 works on paper, spanning 1946–1975. We are particularly interested in showing LaSelle’s use of the grid as a compositional strategy, which began in the late 1940s, dissipated during the 1950s and early 1960s when autonomous shapes gained primacy, but then returned when she began to use masking tape to create hard-edge geometric paintings, from 1964 to 1975.
