Eva Slater

Who is Eva Slater?

Eva Slater, a Hard-Edge artist was born in Berlin, Germany in 1922 and studied art at the Lotte Art Academy. After WW2 ended she moved to the United States where she worked as a fashion illustrator in New York City. After meeting her husband, John Slater, they moved to Los Angeles, California where she began studying painting at Art Center College of Design. It was there that she met Lorser Feitelson who founded the Los Angeles based Hard Edge art movement. Slater became a prominent member of the Hard Edge movement from 1950 through the late 1960s.

Slater’s hard edge paintings are characterized by smooth, meticulously painted surfaces with elegant colors. Her unique contribution to the Hard-edge movement was the use of intricate small triangles that would flow across the painting in irregular patterns. She referred to them as being much like “cells” which interlocked and helped to define the structure of the painting. The triangles concept was abandoned in the early sixties and she went on to make a small number of pure hard edge landscapes with large areas of flat color. She stopped painting in the late 1960s and became a scholar and collector of American Indian basketry, writing the book Panamint Shoshone Basketry, an American Art Form.