California Art Shows- Norman Zammitt at Palm Springs Art Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Painting / Painters, Palm Springs, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 032024
 

“Caly-forny-ay”, 1987, acrylic on canvas

“Caly-forny-ay”, 1987, acrylic on canvas, detail

“Green One” 1975, acrylic on canvas

“Arctic Yellow”, 1975, acrylic on canvas

“One”, 1973, acrylic on canvas

“North Wall”, 1976, acrylic on canvas

“Untitled”, 1977, acrylic on canvas board

“Blue and Yellow Elysium”, 1977, acrylic on canvas board

Norman Zammitt: Gradations, currently on view at Palm Springs Art Museum, highlights the artist’s exploration of color and pattern through his large and small paintings, as well as his sculptural work.

From the museum-

This exhibition highlights Norman Zammitt’s extensive experiments with color and patterns through sculptures, prints, and paintings created between 1964 and 1991. Perceiving a divide between existing color theories and his own direct observation, Zammitt sought new ways of methodically organizing colors in his works across media. By the mid-1970s, he developed a complex mathematical system for mixing pigments in subtly varied shades. Arranging horizontal sections of solid colors in his signature band paintings, the artist produced a broad range of radiant color spectra.

Gradations is the first museum exhibition of Zammitt’s works since 1988. While he earned acclaim and exhibited widely during his lifetime, Zammitt’s achievements have not been as thoroughly examined as those of his peers in the Light and Space movement. This exhibition explores Zammitt’s unique position between West Coast Hard-Edge painting and California Light and Space art and provides insights into his underrecognized artistic accomplishments.

Born in 1931 to Mohawk and Sicilian parents in Toronto, Zammitt spent time on the Kahnawake reservation outside of Montreal before moving to Southern California at age fourteen. Until his death in 2007, Zammitt lived and worked in Los Angeles for the majority of his artistic career.

Zammitt also created paintings using jagged shapes for his “fractal” or “chaos” paintings, two of which are below.

From the museum-

Zammitt produced a series of large paintings based on his consideration of chaos theory. In these works, which he referred to as his “fractal” or “chaos” paintings, outlined shapes appear to fracture or break up the visual space of the canvas while the colors form a larger gradation. He transferred his systematic studies of color progressions into loosely ordered arrangements that contrast organization and irregularity. Zammitt drew inspiration from the mathematical concept that patterns emerge when seemingly random states of disorder and chaos are analyzed within a larger context.

“Triptych XI”, 1992, acrylic on canvas

“Triptych XI”, 1992, acrylic on canvas, detail

“First Fractal”, 1989, acrylic on canvas

“First Fractal”, 1989, acrylic on canvas, detail

The sculptural works in the exhibition continue his exploration of color and pattern, but using plastic.

From the museum-

Zammitt created new forms of sculpture and printmaking through his explorations of geometric shapes and patterns. Across both media, the artist developed methods of layering patterns to create mesmerizing visual effects. Through his sculptural works, he contributed to the emergence of plastic as an accepted artistic material. Zammitt arranged painted plexiglass sheets so as to juxtapose volume and transparent space in his boxes and rectangular sculptures. In his pole sculptures, he further explored sequences of color and transformed plastic by fusing together layers of colored acrylic. Zammitt also experimented with color and patterns in his lithograph prints, which overlay slightly offset arrangements of geometric forms.

Below are a selection of Zammitt’s plastic pole sculptures made of the layers of colored acrylic described above.

This exhibition closes 10/6/24.

NYC Art Shows- Charles Gaines at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography
Mar 282023
 

Charles Gaines’ work never fails to impress and his recent exhibition, Southern Trees, at Hauser and Wirth in NYC, is no exception.

From the press release-

One of the most important conceptual artists working today, the show explores the evolution of Gaines’s complex practice, demonstrating how he has continued to forge new paths within the innovative framework of two of his most acclaimed series, Numbers and Trees and Walnut Tree Orchard. The exhibition’s title, ‘Southern Trees,’ alludes directly to the 150-year-old pecan trees pictured in the new works, and symbolically to the opening lyrics of ‘Strange Fruit,’ Billie Holiday’s haunting protest anthem from the 1930s.

The image of the tree has been central to Gaines’s practice since he first began the Walnut Tree Orchard series in the 1970s. In ‘Southern Trees,’ Gaines advances the series using pecan trees photographed on a visit to Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston County, South Carolina––not far from where the artist was born and lived until he was five years old. Presented alongside a key early example from the walnut tree series, eight new triptych works on paper revisit and expand upon this significant original body of work.

‘Walnut Tree Orchard: Set M’ (1977), on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, pairs a black and white photograph of a walnut tree with two drawings derived from it––an ink outline of the same tree and a grayscale grid that plots all of the trees included in the series up until that point. The newest series, titled Pecan Trees (2022), begins similarly, with a stark black and white photograph of a tree; yet in the drawings that accompany it, Gaines has filled in the outline of the tree with solid ink and used vibrant watercolors to plot all the previous trees in the final drawing. These successive modifications to scale, color and background demonstrate Gaines’s theory that while ‘the system has never changed, the outcome is always different.’

This extends to Gaines’s new Numbers and Trees Plexiglas series, which begin with the artist assigning each tree a distinctive color and numbered grid––breaking down the composition into individual cells that reflect the full form of the tree depicted in the photograph on the surface. However, Gaines reverses his signature process in this new series by overlaying the forms of the trees one at a time and in progression on the back panel of the work rather than on the front. He then brings the photograph to the surface by printing an enlarged detail of the most recently added tree on the work’s Plexiglas surface. This approach brings the tree’s shadowy branches to the foreground, highlighting its textural details and contrasting tones while obscuring the colorful numbered grids painted underneath it. This reversal produces a dramatically different effect, igniting a more somber, yet stirring, reaction to the work as the austere branches, dripping with moss, dominate the picture.

Created through carefully considered systems rather than through the artist’s own imagination or intuition, these new works remove the artist’s subjectivity by following a set of self-determined rules and procedures. The works call into question both the objective nature of the trees and the subjective natural and material human actions that surround them. The fastidious layering process allows Gaines to reveal the differences between the trees’ shapes where the forms do not align. These differences, highlighted by the artist’s systems, suggest the arbitrary nature of other manufactured systems in our society––such as politics, gender, race and class.

This exhibition closes 4/1/23.