Painting – Page 14 – longlistshort

Delaware Art Shows- Create Magic Studios Pop-up in Wilmington

Art, Art Shows by Location, Delaware, Wilmington

Apr 042025

Create Magic Studios, made up of husband and wife team Todd and Allison Purse, has recently taken over local book store Huxley & Hiro‘s future home with a pop-up shop and gallery. The space is filled with artwork from local artists and Todd’s bright, colorful murals.

Along with making artwork and comics, Todd Purse also designs artwork for Brandywine Coffee Roasters, including their hand printed bags. In one of the rooms in the gallery several of them are on display.

Tonight, 4/4/25, is one of the last times to see the space and will be open from 5-8pm with live music from Danny and the Darlings.

It is also ArtLoop Wilmington, a monthly First Friday art walk with several venues around the city staying open late.

NYC Art Shows- Merlin James at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Apr 032025

“Untitled (Pier, Yellow), 2024-25 Acrylic on canvas

“Hobby Horse”, 2024-25, Mixed materials

“Untitled”, 1994-2008, Acrylic on canvas

“Not Titled”, 2024, Acrylic on canvas

Currently on view at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is Merlin James’s solo exhibition, Hobby Horse. The paintings and mixed media works explore the artist’s memories and often use repeating imagery. The exhibition includes James’s earlier work as well as his most current paintings.

From the gallery-

The exhibition title refers to a motif seen in several works, of a small child in a cowboy outfit, riding a hobby horse. Imagery in James’s work, while sometimes suggestive of personal associations or memories, often relates metaphorically to the nature of painting itself. In the classic 1951 essay ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse,’ E. H. Gombrich examines the way a child’s hobby horse “represents” or otherwise corresponds to a real horse, and uses the discussion to illuminate how illusion, abstraction, expression, meaning, and value all function in works of art. James explores similar concerns, and his hobby horse rider perhaps stands, in more ways than one, for the artist.

Another element appearing in several works throughout show is an elongated, centralized, vertical ovoid or mandorla shape, that has recurred in James’s paintings over many years. The artist describes the form as being neither abstract nor representational, and not symbolic, yet having for him an inexplicable reality and resonance.

Further features add to the complexity of James’s project: non-rectilinear formats with curved sides; unusual, artist-made picture frames; transparent gauzes that reveal the structure of the stretcher bars behind. In general, James does not distinguish between support and image.

James’s exhibitions often place new paintings alongside ones from past years, and the present show includes works dating from as far back as the early 1980s. While his art periodically introduces innovations, he considers all his work current and views the development of his oeuvre as cumulative and recursive rather than linear—a quality that parallels the condition of memory.

Certain recent paintings depict the Arnold Circus bandstand in East London, a location James first painted and drew around 1983 when he had a studio nearby. The bandstand’s polygonal structure, and enclosure by fences and flights of steps, evokes some of James’s other motifs such as piers, toll booths, bridges, and entranceways. These works again speak to an interest in the nature of artifice but also suggest more personal references or memories. In some paintings, figures approach each other or the viewer, while other scenes are marked by a palpable absence of any figures at all.

Hobby Horse overall reflects James’s characteristic diversity of subject: land, sky, and seascape; still life objects; nocturnal darkness and dazzling sunlight; glimpses through windows; apparent abstraction; explicit sex; intersecting rivers and roads; likenesses of individuals; and far horizons.

This exhibition closes 4/5/25.

NYC Art Shows- Sung Hwa Kim at Harper’s

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Apr 022025

Sung Hwa Kim‘s beautiful paintings for Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring at Harper’s, celebrate the seasons with jars containing nature scenes and elements that glow.

From the gallery-

Throughout Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, Kim expands upon his exploration of the traditional Korean white porcelain jar as a vessel from which to study the passage of time. He refers to these paintings as visual haikus: poetic snapshots of ephemeral moments that tend to reckon with a change in season and the climactic evolutions that distinguish it. Amidst these evocative scenes of juxtaposed transitions, Kim uses color liberally: brilliant pastels and hypnotic neon saturate ecstatic landscapes wherein urban greets the pastoral and daytime fades into the night.

Works like Still Life with Jar, Moon Lamp, and René Magritte Postcard exude a dreamlike stillness: cool blue tones blanket a sleepy cityscape illuminated only by a crescent moon. But indoors, behind a vast window, Kim fills a jar with a heavenly scene of lakeside greenery, conjuring a pristine spring day. Beyond the vase, a luminous yellow orb bridges the two worlds. The bulbous lamp emits a gentle glow that spotlights beaming petals, trickling down from wilted grey flowers. Kim suspends the scene in temporal limbo across this ethereal work—the artist expertly stages diverging cycles of life and death.

Kim continues to explore existential proximities in Still Life with Jar, Pencil, and Notebook, where time folds in on itself, and reality lingers in a state of flux. A rose-tinted sky melts into the distant cityscape, casting an ephemeral warmth over quiet rooftops—an ending and a beginning intertwined. Within an interior space, a jar holds a cherry blossom tree in eternal bloom, like an oasis untouched by the passing seasons. A notebook and pencil await just outside of the jar, signaling human presence, beckoning the viewer to partake in tranquil introspection.

Ultimately, Kim masterfully inhabits the role of guide, making perceptible the delicate threshold between what fades and what endures. In his surreal yet precisely rendered compositions, he captures the subtle transformations that flow between opposing forces. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring is an exhibition brimming with fragmented worlds—disparate existences and sensations, coexisting in fleeting harmony. By fusing contrasting geographies and temporalities, Kim beckons the viewer to consider the perpetually converging realities that inform life. Through these collisions, the artist challenges viewers to a meditative journey, soliciting the intricate webs that define both the tangible world and the great expanse of the cosmos.

This exhibition closes 4/5/25.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Shyama Golden at Harper’s

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Mar 282025

“Blood Orange Moon”, 2024, Oil on linen

“Daydream of a Nocturne”, 2023, Acrylic and oil on linen

The two paintings above are from In My Mind, Out My Mind, Shyama Golden’s exhibition at Harper’s last year. Golden, along with Narsiso Martinez was recently selected by LACMA to be the Art Here and Now (AHAN) Studio Artists of 2024.

From the Harper’s press release for Golden’s 2024 exhibition-

Across the paintings that comprise In My Mind, Out My Mind, Golden depicts universal cycles of rebirth as told through her personal biography and cultural memory. The artist derives inspiration from her neighboring Los Angeles landscapes and the figure of the yakka in Sri Lankan folklore, a demon or trickster spirit. Plummeting into the belly of the beast, Golden unravels her subconscious turmoil and is then reborn. In the biomythographical series, the artist transcends binaries of good and evil while meditating on the psychic, social, and ideological fissures that inform cyclical transformation.

Like a cinematic storyboard, each painting presents a different scene in Golden’s speculative odyssey. The narrative begins in the cemetery: eerie green hues resound, invoking the unsettling terrain where the living greet the dead. From there, Golden’s protagonist travels through gopher holes and subconscious highways where she collides with an imagined yakka and plunges into its wound. Golden’s avatar concludes her expedition at the Los Angeles River. Here, she emerges from a tree reborn, mirroring the river’s regenerative journey.

Repeatedly, Golden faces troubled interiority directly within this visual retelling of internal affliction. In works like Daydream of a Nocturne, which marks the beginning of the series, the artist’s fictional self sits beside a yakka alter ego among a ring of graves. On a padura, or traditional reed mat, Golden’s avatar presents an offering to the hybrid creature who bears a toothy grin: fish, served on a banana leaf, a clay oil lamp, and an all-American corn dog. These miscellaneous treats appease the yakka while gesturing towards diasporic hybridity.

In Blood Orange Moon, Golden represents herself after she’s ejected from a tree trunk following her expedition through psychological space. As if Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole that leads to Wonderland, Golden’s protagonist shimmies out from the world of her inner demons and happens upon an optimistic landscape. This surreal work, like the rest that comprise In My Mind, Out My Mind, beckons a curiosity for the unfamiliar—a desire that dwells at the pith of the exhibition. Across these scenes, Golden invites the onlooker to be gentler with all that is flawed and foreign. It is these perplexing yet dynamic differences, within ourselves and among others, that make us human.

NYC Art Shows- Robert Indiana at Kasmin

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture

Mar 272025

“LOVE”, 1967, Oil on canvas

“LIP”, 1960-1, Oil on canvas

Robert Indiana: The Source, 1959–1969, currently on view at Kasmin, presents a fascinating selection of the artist’s work from that decade. Several of his well known paintings like LOVE (pictured above) are included, but it is interesting to see his lesser known work as well as the progression in his work throughout this period.

From the gallery about the exhibition-

…Featuring 20 works drawn exclusively from the artist’s personal collection as endowed by Indiana to the Star of Hope Foundation, the exhibition includes an example from the artist’s first edition of LOVE sculptures, conceived in 1966 and executed between 1966—1968, and a vitrine display of archival materials including some of the artist’s journals. This exhibition marks Kasmin’s first collaboration with the Star of Hope Foundation, which was established by the artist in his lifetime, and the gallery’s eighth solo exhibition of work by Indiana since 2003.

Robert Indiana: The Source, 1959–1969 chronicles the Minimalist origins of Indiana’s signature use of signs, symbols, words and numbers. Pairing canonical works with those rarely seen by the public, the exhibition provides a deeper understanding of Indiana as an artist whose output remains emblematic of American culture. The paintings on view demonstrate the personal iconography the artist ascribed to his artwork: as his peers withdrew from the aesthetics of self-expression, Indiana embarked on a career-defining inquiry into the power of symbols to represent meaning. Organized thematically, the exhibition charts Indiana’s influential depictions of words and numbers in bold colors through his early abstractions, reflections on his personal history and the stages of life, and the poetic inevitability of transcendence—a return to the source.

From the gallery about LOVE and LIP–

After discovering a trove of nineteenth-century packaging stencils in 1960, Indiana began incorporating words and numbers in his paintings, spearheading the adoption of commercial advertisement as a language of art. LIP (1960–61), an early example of a single word painting, features the title word’s yellow letters at the center of two intersecting orbs, whose contours suggestively form a pair of red lips. Unraveling the distinction between sign and symbol, the composition suggests a kiss, a universal bodily expression of love.

More selections and information from the gallery below-

“October Painting”, 1959-60, Oil on canvas

Indiana began this composition, which depicts the shadows of a dracaena plant, in October 1959. “This, I feel, is a very seminal painting,” he wrote in a journal entry the following December, seeking to distinguish his own visual language from artists Jack Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly.

“Ra”, c.1961, Oil on canvas

From the gallery-

After painting a series of orbs in 1959, Indiana revisited the theme in Ra (c. 1961), a triptych arranging a number of red, blue, and green circles in flattened pictorial space. This work’s title reflects Indiana’s early interest in mythology, referencing the Egyptian sun god Ra, historically depicted with a red solar orb and cobra over his head.

Circles appear in Indiana’s work as early as 1958 and resound through paintings such as Mother and Father (1963-66) and Hallelujah (Jesus Saves) (1969). The arrangement of orbs in Ra suggests Indiana’s fascination with sequences, an avenue he would explore in paintings of numbers including Cardinal Nine (1966), on view nearby.

“Cardinal 9”, 1966, Oil on canvas

Indiana’s Cardinal Numbers series (1966) depicts the numbers one through zero in red, blue, and green. Adopting the typography of a business calendar, Indiana conceived of each number to represent a stage of life. Cardinal Nine represents the near end of the sequence, just before zero. The palette held sentimental significance for Indiana, who recalled memories of the red and green signage of Phillips 66, the gas company where his father worked, against the open blue sky.

“Mother and Father”, 1963-1966, Oil on canvas

From the gallery-

Indiana’s extraordinary diptych Mother and Father (1963-66) depicts the artist’s scantily dressed adoptive parents entering a Model T Ford within two circles, as if observed through a pair of binoculars. Conceived as the first to depict his parents in each of the four seasons, Indiana only realized one iteration of the series, set in the winter. Details of the vehicle’s license plate allude to Indiana’s conception ahead of his birth in September 1928, as if to mythologize the artist’s biography.

In an accompanying artist statement, Indiana described this painting as an essential part of his celebrated American Dream series (1961-2001), which earned Indiana’s first major recognition after early acquisitions by The Museum of Modern Art, Van Abbemuseum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and elsewhere.

Indiana exhibited this painting in an early state in 1964, later adding its stenciled lettering in 1966. He continued to exhibit the work extensively, including in the São Paulo Biennial in 1967 and his traveling institutional retrospectives of 1968, 1977, 1982, and 2013.

“August Is Memory Carmen”, 1963, Oil on canvas

From the gallery-

The number 8 held special resonance for Indiana, whose mother, Carmen, was born in the month of August. August Is Memory Carmen
(1963) incorporates the title of a lyric poem Indiana wrote in 1953, four years after her death. Indiana depicted her portrait alongside his father, Earl, in Mother and Father (1963-66), installed nearby.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25. It is presented in dialogue with Pace Gallery’s upcoming exhibition Robert Indiana: The American Dream, which will open May 9, 2025.

Flashback- Florida Art Shows- Rigaud Benoit at Tampa Museum of Art

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Florida Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Tampa

Mar 212025

To celebrate the beginning of Spring, two paintings by Haitian artist Rigaud Benoit– Fleurs du printemps (Spring Flowers),1965 and Les Oiseaux (The Birds), 1973.

The work was part of last year’s exhibition Reframing Haitian Art: Masterworks from the Arthur Albrecht Collection at Tampa Museum of Art.

Sunday Energy- Joseph Ducreux at The Getty Museum in Los Angeles

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Mar 092025

This painting, Self Portrait, Yawning created by 1783, is by French artist Joseph Ducreux and can be seen at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

From the museum about the work-

Joseph Ducreux experimented with the traditional limitations of the genre of self-portraiture by creating an expressive, humorous, and rather unorthodox image of himself stretching and yawning. Dressed informally in a turban and bright red jacket, Ducreux, in the midst of a huge yawn, opens his mouth wide, contorting his face with the effort and stretching his right arm toward the viewer. Holding this exaggerated pose, his back sways and his stomach pushes forward; his entire body presses up close to the surface of the picture.

Ducreux was interested in the study of physiognomy and frequently used his own features as a convenient means to observe various expressions. In fact, he executed dozens of similarly exaggerated self-portraits throughout his career. A contemporary critic admired this self-portrait for its warmth, color, and expression, but later critics complained about the repetition of the subject.

Delaware Art Shows- Howard Pyle at Delaware Art Museum

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Illustration, Painting / Painters

Mar 052025

Pictured are two paintings by artist and illustrator Howard Pyle, The Mermaid (1910) and The Flying Dutchman (1900), currently on view at Delaware Art Museum. Pyle played an important part in the history of the arts in Delaware, especially in Wilmington, where he was based. The Mermaid was his last painting. He passed away in Italy in 1911 and the painting was left unfinished on his easel. It was completed by his student Frank Schoonover.

From the museum about the artist-

Howard Pyle captivated American readers and aspiring illustrators with his passion for storytelling. Based in Wilmington, Delaware, Pyle illustrated and wrote for the nation’s most popular magazines. His art breathed life into fictional villains and historical heroes. Pyle taught a generation of students including Violet Oakley, Frank Schoonover, and N. C. Wyeth. Today, illustrators, filmmakers, and animators still celebrate his lasting imprint on the nations visual culture.

Launching his illustration practice in the 1870s, Pyle built a successful career that spanned thirty years. He excelled throughout rapid industry expansion and vast changes in printing technology. Pyle published thousands of images in books and magazines. Beginning in 1905, Pyle transferred his skills as a storyteller into mural painting. When he died, his students and friends came together to preserve his extraordinary legacy. They formed the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, which became the Delaware Art Museum.

Howard Pyle was born on this day in (3/5) in 1853.

Mel Bochner 1940-2025

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Feb 282025

“Oh Well”, 2013, acrylic on canvas

The above paintings are from Mel Bochner‘s 2024 exhibition ALL SALES FINAL! at TOTAH, in NYC. Sadly, the artist passed away this month at the age of 84.

Bochner was a conceptual artist with a career filled with works that challenged expectations. His work incorporated photography, installation pieces, and later the text-based paintings for which he became well known.

Border Crossings Magazine has an excellent interview with the artist from 2018 where he discusses his work and process, his early days writing about art, his famous Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art from 1966, and more.

Below are a few excerpts-

On the text paintings and the viewer-

The “Thesaurus” paintings are a lot about voice, about who’s speaking and the tone of one’s voice. I don’t think it is anything that painting has dealt with very well. It’s one of the places where colour comes in because colour sets a tone, in an aural as well as visual sense. The viewer becomes a reader, a very different sense of involvement. The words grab the viewer. Once they see there is something to read, they’re liable to stop and read it. They engage with the painting in a different way, because seeing and reading take place in separate parts of the brain.

On where the words come from-

So is the process one in which you’ll get a word in your head from reading or overhearing something, and that will be the ignition for that particular painting?

I like that “point of ignition,” but you never know when it’s going to happen. Many years ago when both my kids were living at home, one was in high school and one was in grade school, listening to them talk was like living in a language factory. I would hear stuff and say, “Wow, that is a really interesting word, I can use that.” Sometimes I would overhear a conversation on the subway or read something in the newspaper and that would get me thinking. The words could come from anywhere. What I was trying to understand is how we talk now.

And here he discusses his use of color in the text works, specifically in Oh Well (2010)-

Is all language necessarily a palimpsest, so that when you enter its terrain, you’re always entering previously occupied spaces?

Yes. The thing with synonyms, which Roget himself first said, is that no two words ever mean the same thing. You’re moving through different shades and approximations of meaning. That was something I was thinking about in regards to the colour in the “Thesaurus” paintings. I never used the same colour twice in the same painting. They all had to shade off somehow, like synonyms. I would make a drawing recording every colour that went into every letter, and there are a couple of hundred letters in each painting. For example, Oh Well (2010). “Oh” was in Old Holland yellow green, “well” was in Williamsburg brilliant yellow, plus pale grey and cadmium yellow medium. “That’s” was in Gamblin quinacridone violet with a touch of Holbein grey and white. “Goes” was Williamsburg persian rose pure. Some of them got really complicated. “To” was Holbein light red earth and Old Holland yellow ochre deep and Williams cadmium orange and Gamblin Portland grey medium and Old Holland warm grey light plus white, plus Williams quinacridone maroon. This was my shopping list.

He also discusses his interest in philosophy and in this section he discusses Edmund Husserl‘s idea of brackets and applies it to creating art-

…When you can’t figure something out in math, you set it aside by putting it in brackets. You haven’t eliminated it; you haven’t discarded it; it’s just there waiting for you. So as I started reducing my work more and more, I put all those things aside: “Right now I can’t deal with colour; I can’t deal with shape; I can’t deal with surface. So what can I deal with; what can I do that feels authentic to me?” In the beginning it was just drawing numbers or writing words. Then as time went on I wanted to add things back in to increase the range and depth of the work.

To take them out of the brackets?

To move them into the equation. As you get older you build up a body of work and gradually give yourself more permission. I always thought that if Mondrian in his most classical year—1923 or 1924—if somebody had shown him Victory Boogie Woogie (1944), unfinished with all that masking tape, and said, “You’re going to paint this in 20 years,” he would have said, “You’re out of your mind, there’s no way I’m going to do that. It’ll never happen.” Or he would have had a heart attack and dropped dead on the spot. So if you’re fortunate to work for a certain length of time, there’s a trajectory but it’s not direct. If you want to continue making things that surprise you, you have to go against your own sensibility and see where the contradictions will take you.

The deferral that is contained within the brackets is a lovely notion. Does it mean that the act of being an artist is an engagement with contingency?

Yes, but there are always limits to contingency. Look, if you come into your studio, day after day, year after year, you want to have the feeling by the end of that day that you might have done something you’ve never seen before, something unexpected. If it’s the same old thing, then what are you doing? The place to be is where you don’t know where your work is going. If it doesn’t go anywhere today, that’s okay, too, because maybe it will tomorrow.

Feb 202025

Large painting on the right- Bettina Brendel, “Particles or Waves?”, 1969, acrylic on canvas

Center sculpture by Claire Falkenstein- “Point as a Set #10, c.1962, copper

Palm Springs Art Museum is currently showing Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990 a selection of abstract work created by Southern California artists influenced by that era’s scientific ideas and breakthroughs. These explorations are divided into sections focused on optical science, mathematics, color in motion, and space age abstraction. The exhibition also includes several experimental films created during this period.

From the museum-

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, scientists at institutions near Los Angeles including Mount Wilson Observatory, the California Institute for Technology, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, generated groundbreaking experimental research in astronomy and particle physics. During and after World War II, the region remained at the forefront of scientific inquiry in theoretical physics and its applications within aerospace engineering, industrial manufacturing, and communications technologies. Between 1945 and 1990, many artists in Los Angeles produced visually abstract artworks while closely engaging with scientific ideas, mathematical theories, and materials or processes derived from physics and engineering.

The exhibition unites several generations of artists working in diverse materials and styles to examine how subfields of scientific investigation inspired a range of non-figurative artworks by practitioners concerned with light, energy, motion, and time. By drawing interdisciplinary connections between the work of early abstractionists and contemporary practitioners, the exhibition considers abstract artwork from Southern California in a new way.

Below are a few selections along with information from the museum.

Claire Falkenstein, “Orbit the Earth”, 1963, Oil and metallic paint on nine canvas panels

Claire Falkenstein, “Orbit the Earth”, 1963, Oil and metallic paint on nine canvas panels

Through both abstract paintings and sculptures, Falkenstein explored subjects inspired by astrophysics. In Orbit the Earth, she conveys a sense of motion through patterns of curved points in metallic paint and sweeping lines that reveal traces of the painting’s black background. The artist referred to her small gestural marks as “moving points” and explored how arrangements of these painted forms could express types of motion and energy in the universe. In her hanging sculpture Sun represents a dynamic celestial form that shifts in appearance as viewers move around the work. The sculpture’s open, webbed structure creates a continuum between the work and its surrounding space, parallelling interconnections between the Sun and other cosmic phenomena in the solar system.

Helen Lundeberg, “Untitled (Sectioned Planet)”, 1969, Acrylic on canvas

Eva Slater, “Galaxy”, 1954, Oil on panel

Oskar W. Fischinger, “Space Abstraction No.3”, 1966, Oil on canvas

Oskar W. Fischinger, “Multi wave”, 1948, Oil on canvas

Hilaire Hiler, “Parabolic Orange to Leaf Green”, 1942, Oil on board

Dr. Frank J. Malina, “Mitosis”, 1974, Painted wood, painted plexiglas, metal, fluorescent tubes, motor

Inspired by the idea of enlivening artwork with electricity, Malina developed a range of kinetic paintings like Mitosis beginning in 1956. This work exemplifies the artist’s Lumidyne system of works where illuminated colors shift through cycles generated by an encased motor, rotating components, and electric light sources. A founder of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1936 and a preeminent American specialist in rocketry, Malina turned to creating artwork in the early 1950s after relocating to France.

DeWain Valentine, “Vertical Section”, 1979, Laminated glass

DeWain Valentine, “Vertical Section”, 1979, Laminated glass (detail)

Bettina Brendel, “Prisms”, 1982, Acrylic on canvas

Miriam Schapiro, “Computer Series #3”, 1969, Acrylic on canvas

Bettina Brendel “A Numbered Universe”, 1966, Oil on canvas

In A Numbered Universe, Brendel painted the symbols of binary code within a grid drawn onto the canvas in pencil. The work’s composition is both structured and slightly irregular. The hand painted notations and off-kilter composition humanize the abstract technological language of computer code.

Lee Mullican, “Computer Joy”, 1987, TGA file 512 x 428 pixels

In Computer Joy, repeated and overlaid sections of lines and geometric forms produce an all-over field of pixelated patterns.
While teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1986, Mullican explored the artistic posibilities of new computer imaging technologies. The ability to readily duplicate digital shapes using the computer complemented his long-standing practice of applying repeated striations of pigment into patterned arrangements in paintings like Source from 1981.

Lee Mullican, “Source”, 1981, Oil on canvas

Lee Mullican, “Source”, 1981, Oil on canvas (detail)

James Turrell, “Afrum (White)”, 1966, projected light

In Afrum (White), a modified projector casts a rectangle of white light onto the corner of the otherwise darkened gallery, creating the illusion of a floating three-dimensional cube. The crisply defined area of light changes in appearance depending on how viewers move in the space. Through his precise manipulation of light within specific spatial environments, James Turrell creates opportunities for viewers to engage with nuanced processes of perceptual experience.

Man Ray, “Shakespearean Equation: King Lear”, 1948, Oil on canvas

While living in Hollywood in the late 1940s, Man Ray produced his Shakespearean Equations, a series of paintings depicting mathematical models that reference plays by William Shakespeare. King Lear highlights the aesthetic qualities of a particular form known in algebraic geometry as a Kummer surface with eight real double points. For the artist, the drips of paint on the mathematical form recalled the tears shed by King Lear after learning that his favorite daughter was killed, layering human emotion onto the geometric shape.

This exhibition, part of The Getty’s PST ART programming, closes Sunday, 2/24/25.

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