Back to Basics: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation
Date: August 31, 2015 – December 6, 2015
Curated By: Billie Milam Weisman
Venue: Pepperdine University, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art
24255 Pacific Coast Hwy, Malibu, CA 90263
(310) 506-4851
https://arts.pepperdine.edu/museum/2015-2016/back-to-basics.htm
Exhibited Artists:
Josef Albers, Tim Bavington, Charles Biederman, Isaac Brest, S Byrne, Doug Edge, Eric Freeman, Paul Gadegaard, Betty Gold, Daniel Jackson, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol Lewitt, Vladmir Llaguno, Joe Lloyd, Kenneth Noland, Ryu Okabayashi, Jiro Okura, Toshinobu Onosato, Erwin Redl, Michael Rey, Dorothea Rockburne, Paul Rusconi, Robert Schaberl, Yoshio Sekine, Arthur Silverman, Frank Stella, Gary Stephan, Kamol Tassananchalee, Jeremy Thomas, John Trezic, Velizar Mihich Vasa, and Victor Vasarely.
Back to Basics: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation
Back to Basics explores the range of geometric abstraction from 1960s Colorfield painting, Hard-Edge, and Minimalism to the present. Today this style has become an essential part of our everyday world and influences all aspects of contemporary design—from clothing to magazines to websites. But this style in art was originally shocking and revolutionary. The artists who pioneered geometric abstraction advanced a new way of seeing—one based on basic forms, powerful shapes, and essential colors. Their goal was to reach something vital and fundamental in human experience.
This exhibition features 46 large-scale works of art ranging in date from 1958 to 2014. It includes works by the great names in postwar art—Josef Albers, Kenneth Noland, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Ellsworth Kelly—and by a new, younger generation of artists—Anish Kapoor, Tim Bavington, and Isaac Brest, to name but a few. These works present half a century of artists investigating the timeless power of simplicity.
Although the art is united by a basic vocabulary of simple, geometric forms, the message and meaning of each work differs dramatically. Josef Albers, the German-born American artist and educator, was interested primarily in perception. He inspired generations of artists through his teaching first at the famed Bauhaus School in Germany, then at Black Mountain College, and finally at Yale University. He is represented by Homage to the Square: Upon Arrival of 1958. In this iconic series he used a single format—three offset concentric squares—to explore the subjective experience of color. His goal was to test how different pigments arranged side-by-side can produce radically different perceptual and psychological effects, such as the feeling of forms advancing or receding in space.
Ellsworth Kelly also used geometry to explore perception but did so in a different way. While an art student studying in Paris in the 1950s he became captivated by fascinating abstract shapes he noticed on the streets, such as a shadow or the area defined by a partially opened door. Shapes such as these—ignored and overlooked by most people—became the basis of his refined and elegant Painted Wall Sculptures of 1982, a series of five brightly colored, eccentrically shaped panels. The artist credits his experience as a bird-watcher as a child and as a camouflage artist during World War II as essential to influencing his visual sensibility.
While artists such as Albers and Kelly explored perception, the British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor was most interested in transcendence. Since the mid-1990s he has worked with highly reflective surfaces of polished stainless steel. These sculptures are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and surroundings. Perhaps the best-known of his sculptures in the United States is Cloud Gate, a monumental public sculpture in Chicago's new Millennium Park, resembling a giant mirrored bean. He is represented at the Weisman Museum by Blood Mirror III of 2000. This mirrored, deep red bowl—which seems to be present and absent at the same time—offers a transcendental experience that combines the artist's interest in both Western and Eastern culture.
Younger artists often draw inspiration from popular culture. Tim Bavington bases his abstract paintings on contemporary music, often choosing rock-and-roll songs. Using a computer program, he translates notes into vertical bands of color. Using an airbrush he then carefully paints his pattern of notes onto his canvas. His paintings explore the connection between the visual and the aural, using abstraction to cross into the realm of other sensory phenomena.
As the Bauhaus artist Paul Klee once said, "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible." The artists in this stunning exhibition show that geometry is a creative tool that artists can use to explore the realms of ideas and perception, of seeing and knowing. Back to Basics celebrates the artistic desire to see and discover more beautiful than everyday reality.