Los Angeles Art Shows- “Lumen: The Art & Science of Light” at The Getty Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Glasswork, Illustration, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 062024
 

As part of their programming for PST: Art & Science Collide, Getty Museum is showing Lumen: The Art & Science of Light. The exhibition includes a collection of European medieval artwork, along with several contemporary works, that focus in some way on the science and concept of light.

From the museum about the show-

Through the manipulation of materials such as gold, crystal, and glass, medieval artists created dazzling light-filled environments, evoking, in the earthly world, the layered realms of the divine. To be human is to crave light. We rise and sleep according to the rhythms of the sun, and have long associated light with divinity. Focusing on the arts of western Europe, this exhibition explores the ways in which the science of light was studied by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers, theologians, and artists during the “long Middle Ages” (800-1600 CE), when science and religion were firmly intertwined. Natural philosophy (the study of the physical universe) served as the connective thread for diverse cultures across Europe and the Mediterranean, uniting scholars who inherited, translated, and improved on a common foundation of ancient Greek scholarship.

This story is equal parts science, poetics, and craft. By bringing together a variety of media that materialize light and objects that communicate how medieval people understood the lights of the heavens and of the eye, this exhibition demonstrates how science informed the artistry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. To convey the continuing sense of wonder inspired by starry skies or moving light on precious materials, the exhibition includes several contemporary works of art placed in dialogue with historic objects.

Below are a few selections-

“On the Construction of the World”, in “Book of Divine Works (Liber divinorum operum)” (text in Latin), Rupertsberg, Rhineland, Germany, about 1210-40 CE by Hildegard of Bingen (German, 1098-1179 CE), Tempera, gold, and ink on parchment

About this work from the museum-

The nun and philosopher Hildegard of Bingen is known for her deeply religious visionary experiences in which she communed with the fiery “living light” (lux vivens) of God. Yet her evocative spiritual imagery reflects the language of science and cosmology. Shown at lower left, Hildegard, an illuminator as well as author, recorded her dazzling vision of the human at the center of nested elemental spheres. The figure is ringed by heavenly bodies, the clouds, and the winds, all encircled by the figure of flaming Caritas, or Divine Love. As a way to understand humankind’s relationship to the Godhead, Hildegard’s imagery emphasizes the correspondence between the body and the cosmos; just as the four humors affected health, the four winds controlled the earth, and the vivifying power of divine light nourished both.

“The Glorification of the Virgin”, attributed to Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Haarlem, northern Netherlands, about 1490-95 CE, Oil on panel

The painting above by Geertgen tot Sint Jans has so many fascinating details and was part of a section titled Divine Darkness.

The wall text from that section-

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all associate God with light. In the Creation story told in Genesis, when light was created, so too was darkness. As medieval optical theorists understood that sight was contingent upon light and that bodily vision was not possible in darkness, theologians of the time equated the unknowable, invisible aspects of God with darkness. According to a medieval “negative theology,” God exists beyond human perception and poses a challenge to vision itself. The fifteenth-century Christian theologian Nicholas of Cusa wrote that “God is found when all things are left behind; and this darkness is light in the Lord.” Such contradictory associations between God and both light and darkness were fundamental to the verbal and visual expressions used to elucidate the nature of the divine.

And about the painting-

Golden light surrounds the glorified Virgin Mary and Christ child at the center of this intimate and absorbingly detailed devotional painting as a luminous host of angels fills the heavens with eternal music. Their brightness contrasts with the dark perimeter that envelops this apocalyptic vision to suggest the ineffable darkness in which God dwells.

Constellations from a Hebrew Translation of Ptolemy’s “Almagest”, In an astronomical anthology (text in Hebrew), Catalonia, about 1361 CE, Tempura, gold, and ink on parchment and Astrolabe (with Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic Script), Iberia (Spain) or Italy, 1300s CE

From the museum about these two items-

In the Muslim and Christian courts of Europe, and particularly in Iberia, highly educated, multilingual Jews held important positions as physicians and astrologers. Jewish practitioners of these related fields contributed original works on astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy, drawing from and improving on Greco-Arabic sciences. At left, the Hebrew translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest (a work that was little known in Europe before 1200) updated the ancient text with the addition of astronomical tables that guided religious observance. Only a small number of European astrolabes with Hebrew inscriptions survive. This exquisite example lists the names of twenty-four stars in a combination of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. The centermost circle marks the ecliptic, or the sun’s path, and is labeled with the zodiacal signs in Hebrew.

“Untitled (Mugarnas)”, 2012, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Mirrors, reverse-glass painting, and plaster on wood

One of the most impressive contemporary pieces in the show was the sculpture pictured above, by Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaian, which captured and reflected light so beautifully.

About the work from the museum-

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was deeply inspired by a visit to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz, Iran. The vaulted domes and walls of that site are covered in dazzling, intricate mirror mosaics that fracture and dematerialize space while reflecting light and amplifying movement and activity in the shrine below. Farmanfarmaian began exploring these mosaic techniques, eventually collaborating with master artisans to produce sculptural and wall-mounted works that incorporate mirror mosaic and reverse-glass painting. Untitled (Mugarnas) adopts the sacred and decorative forms that are common in Islamic architecture, and expresses the perfection of creation.

This exhibition closes 12/8/24.

 

NYC Art Shows- Lucy Puls at Nicelle Beauchene

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 182024
 

“Equulus Duo (Two Horseys)”, 1993, Resin, steel, toy horses

“Noven Beastiolae et Octo Massae (Nine Animals and Eight Blocks)”, 1994/99 Resin, stuffed animals, steel, wood, paint

“Sub-Tristis (Somewhat Sad)”, steel, paper towel roll, resin, bees wax, dead fly, 1989

“Notae Litterarum (Foreign Trade)”, 2003, Book, glue, steel

Lucy Puls’s sculptures for Here Everywhere at Nicelle Beauchene encourage the viewer to think about objects in a new way, while also seeing them in the context of their own history. The thrift store toys in her resin sculptures are reminiscent of specimens in a jar or bugs in amber. A roll of paper towels, coated in resin and bees wax, also has a fly on it as if, like the people preserved at Pompeii, an event caused it to be trapped in this moment.  Casts of ships that no longer sail, and books detailing things no longer important, are made and remade into new forms with new codes to decipher. Consumerism, technology, even language itself (her titles are in Latin and English), evolve and change.  What will remain of the present day as we move into the future? Are there clues in what Puls has made using remnants of the past?

From the press release-

Showcasing selected works from 1989 to 2003, Here Everywhere highlights Puls’ unique and overlooked approach to materials and form, surveying her early experiments in making sculpture with found objects, wax, and resin.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Puls turned to making small, resin-cast sculpture with personal effects, found objects, and outmoded household items. At the time, Puls had been making large-scale fiberglass and corrugated metal sculpture; as a reprieve from this labor-intensive work, she began to experiment with leftover waxes and resins on more intimately sized works using items that were on hand in the studio or discovered during thrift shop runs.

Here Everywhere presents selected artworks made across almost fifteen years, loosely arranged into three categories that broadly describe their materials: Small Things, In Resin, and Of Book.

Comprising Small Things is an example of one of Puls’ very first experiments in wax from 1989, Dicis Causa (For the Sake of Appearances). Puls coated a fur hat in a mixture of wax and resin, tipping the form on its edge and affixing insects to its interior surface. Once a status symbol, here the fur hat transforms from a useable object to relic, recognizable, yet made distant through the artist’s material interventions and presentation on a steel shelf.

Works from In Resin include heavily sanded, amberized sculptures arranged throughout the gallery at varying heights atop artist-made shelves and pedestals. Assembled in this series are objects that made their way into thrift stores en masse throughout the 1990s, including once sought-after goods such as the Macintosh 512K and My Little Pony toys. Puls primarily acquired items that had been marked down at resale stores, thus seeking to understand the ways our consumer tendencies pave the way for trend cycles and widespread obsolescence. Children’s toys, in particular, mark this system for the artist; Res Parvus (Little Things) (1991) and Pueri Arma (Child’s Gun) (1991) reveal assembled compositions of the consumer objects that denote childhood—from the innocence and ubiquity of small, plastic figurines to the targeted marketing of BB guns to young boys.

Made a decade later, Imperfectus (Encyclopedia Britannica) (2002) and Involvo (Websters Twentieth Century, Red) (2002) from the series Of Book were created in a time-intensive process of gluing and layering. Unbinding and re-articulating the ideologic form of the encyclopedia, Puls meticulously transformed thousands of loose pages into solid, illegible objects.

The goal across all three series, Puls says, was to achieve in sculpture that which is done with relative ease in painting and drawing: to reduce “representation” to its simplest means while physically separating the object, or artwork, from real-time reality. This is to suggest the idea of a physical object that is both there and not there, devoid of any use-value yet rife with manifold meanings and associations. Through a “strangely alluring sense of loss,” as Glen Helfand described of the work in 2005, Puls turns Dada and Minimalist principles inside out, asking us to more deeply consider the influence of everyday objects and the way they reflect essential ideas of who we are.

This exhibition closes 5/18/24.