Displaying items by tag: abstraction

“Le Onde: Waves of Italian Influence (1914–1971)” runs Aug. 22–Jan. 3, 2016, at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. This exhibition of nearly 20 works from the museum’s collection follows Italian contributions to the transnational evolution of abstraction, through movements and tendencies such as futurism, spatialism, op art and kinetic art.

The exhibition includes several works that have been exhibited only rarely or not at all since entering the collection. Among those that have not been on view since the Hirshhorn’s inaugural exhibition in 1974–1975 are works by Zero group founder Heinz Mack, French op artist Yvaral and Italian painter Carlo Battaglia and several works by Italian artist Enrico Castellani.

In 1969, when the Bauhaus-trained Hungarian émigré László Moholy-Nagy received his first career retrospective, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) was one of several West Coast stops for a show that many critics considered the most prescient of that tumultuous year. Moholy-Nagy pointed the way toward several of the dominant themes emerging in the art of the 1970s, and he appears to have left a particularly sharp impression on the hardedge abstractionists and finish fetish artists of Southern California. For Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin, among many others, Moholy’s take on constructivism became a landmark for the lineup.

The San Jose Museum of Art has received a major gift of 44 works of art from the collection of Barbara and Dixon Farley. Among the highlights are works by Jay DeFeo, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, Gay Outlaw, Richard Serra, James Siena, David Simpson, Richard Shaw, and Peter Wegner. This latest group of works joins the Farley’s earlier gift of 29 works given to the Museum following Mr. Farley’s death in 2012. SJMA will showcase the Farley’s gift in a fall 2015 exhibition.

“The Farleys built their collection with deep passion, independence, and a keen eye for abstraction. Their art filled their home and their life—as did their commitment to supporting the work of living artists,” said Susan Krane, Oshman Executive Director of SJMA.

"Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015" is a major new exhibition tracing a century of Abstract art from 1915 to the present day, and is to open at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. The exhibition brings together over 100 works by 100 modern masters and contemporary artists including Carl Andre, David Batchelor, Dan Flavin, Andrea Fraser, Piet Mondrian, Gabriel Orozco, Hélio Oiticica, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Rosemarie Trockel, Theo Van Doesburg and Andrea Zittel, taking over six exhibition spaces across the gallery.

The show is curated by Iwona Blazwick OBE, Director, and Magnus af Petersens, Curator at Large, Whitechapel Gallery, "Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015," is international in its scope.

Abstract paintings and sculptures were once the gold standard of Modern art. They spoke of adventurous aesthetic expeditions into hitherto unexplored visual realms.

Since the 1950s the figurative banner was held high by marvelous painters such as David Park in San Francisco, Jane Freilicher in New York and many others, but abstraction, nonetheless, ruled. By the late 1970s, though, change was underway.

On Friday, January 2, 2015, Melissa Morgan Fine Art, a contemporary gallery in Palm Desert, California, will present the newest body of work from painter Richard Baker. “Desert Scenes” features sun-drenched canvases depicting popular leisure activities among desert dwellers, including horseback riding, golf, and tennis.

Baker, who studied painting at the University of Pennsylvania under the celebrated British-born realist painter Rackstraw Downes, is highly influenced by cinematography, which stems from his professional experience as a leading film and television producer. Employing dramatic compositions, heavy brushstrokes, and exaggerated colors, Baker adds a surreal quality to everyday scenes, creating paintings that toe the line between realism and material abstraction.

A zigzag engraving on a mussel's shell may transform scientific understanding of what has long been considered a defining human capacity: artistic creativity.

Until now, the earliest evidence of geometric art was dated from 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. Scratched into rocks found in South African caves, those engravings signified behavioral modernity: Homo sapiens' unique cognitive journey into a sophisticated world of abstraction and symbol.

But new analysis of an engraving excavated from a riverbank in Indonesia suggests that it's at least 430,000 years old—and that it wasn't made by humans, scientists announced Wednesday. At least it wasn't made by humans as most people think of them, meaning Homo sapiens.

The Gerhard Richter show inaugurating Marian Goodman’s heavily anticipated London gallery is nothing short of superb. Curated by the artist, it showcases Richter’s recent experiments with abstraction, while subtly inscribing these within the history of his practice. The exhibition is not—as some might have feared—the “greatest hits” of an auction favorite. It represents a thoughtful presentation of an artistic mind at work. And it shows that mind as alert to the yet-untapped potential of the pictorial medium as when Richter first rose to fame a half-century ago.

Spread over two floors of the Victorian-era warehouse—tastefully refurbished by David Adjaye Associates—the exhibition features three bodies of work: “Strip,” “Flow,” and a series of painted photographs, which Richter initiated in 1986.

Art Basel in Miami Beach has just released details about Survey, its brand new section devoted to “art-historical projects” (read: art that was made a few decades ago). The thirteen projects cover quite a bit of ground, ranging from a group show of female geometric abstractionists to a solo presentation of Chilean political artist Lotty Rosenfeld.

It has been over a hundred years since abstraction was adopted in Western painting, and we’re still trying to make sense of it. Despite the rather clunky subtitle and the fact that the exhibition is drawn from a single collection, “Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell” offers an excellent, compact survey of some of the key arguments.

One thing highlighted at the beginning of the show, which includes works by 23 painters, is that, along with the rise of abstract art, our concept of traditional art history — how one movement or artist invariably influences the next generation — has changed.