Robert Swain "Immersion In Color and Visual Sensation"

ROBERT SWAIN Immersion In Color and Visual Sensation

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

ISBN: 978-1-955260-87-9 Front Cover: Installation Robert Swain Immersion In Color and Visual Sensation at David Richard Gallery Title Page: Robert Swain Immersion In Color and Visual Sensation at David Richard Gallery Back Cover: Installation Robert Swain Immersion In Color and Visual Sensation at David Richard Gallery Printed on the occasion of the exhibition Installation Robert Swain Immersion In Color and Visual Sensation at David Richard Gallery June 23 through August 31, 2021 Published by: David Richard Gallery, LLC, 211 East 121st Street, New York, NY 10035 www.DavidRichardGallery.com 212-882-1705 | 505-983-9555 DavidRichardGalleries1 DavidRichardGallery Gallery Staff: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, Managers

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Artwork: © 2019 - 2020 - Robert Swain Catalogue: © 2021 David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY

Catalogue Design: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY Images © Yao Zu Lu

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

ROBERT SWAIN Immersion In Color and Visual Sensation

ROBERT SWAIN Immersion In Color and Visual Sensation

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David Richard Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new monumental paintings

by New York artist Robert Swain. These paintings are on his new aluminum supports in a selection of meticulously selected palettes as part of his ongoing exploration of a prismatic range of colors organized in grid compositions comprised of 12-inch squares with varying degrees of saturation and values to create gradients and harmonic transitions from one end of the composition to the other.

More important than the artist’s formal specifications are the phenomenological responses to the spectral gradients and transitions of the adjacent colors that interact together directly in the viewer’s eye (and mind) to mix and blend one with the next.

The sizes of these newest large-scale paintings range from: 8 foot tall by 12 foot wide and 10 foot by 12 foot up to 10 foot tall by 26 foot wide. These paintings are installed and available for viewing in the artist’s studio by appointment only. Swain has also painted four additional large paintings on the aluminum supports, each measuring 7-foot square and they are included in the exhibition catalog.

About the Paintings of Robert Swain: New York artist Robert Swain continues his creative use of the square as his compositional element of choice for characterizing over 5,000 colors, their values and degrees of saturation. But, more specifically, he uses the square element and the resulting grid compositions to elucidate the color blending between adjacent hues that observers experience while viewing his iconic paintings. Swain’s artwork and life-long project is studying the human response to color. His paintings are much more than grids of color, they represent 50 years of systemic studies of how color and color juxtapositions affect the way human’s view color and the corresponding effects on the human psyche.

His paintings demonstrate that the human eye will start to blend adjacent colors in certain ways such that the viewer sees a harmonization (blending) of the colors or an entirely new color. It is quite remarkable, and viewers can actually experience this phenomenon with digital images if they can concentrate on their monitor with minimal glare and distraction. The viewer will see new faint bands of color appear that are mixtures of the squares of color from the left or right, or top or bottom of the painting; often, the blending is happening and visible in multiple directions simultaneously.

These bands of blended colors will shift in different orientations and directions with different compositions and organizations of the color as well as the viewer’s distance and angle of position relative to the painting.

Swain’s exhibition in 2014 at the Santa Monica Museum inspired the artist more than he could have imagined as he presented some of his largest paintings to date that were conceived and created specifically for that presentation, The Form of Color, curated by Jeffrey Uslip. The artist was finally able to both create and realize the sensational and overwhelming feeling from being immersed in his prismatic color palettes that not only transformed the viewing space, but also the viewer’s experience (including the artist’s). Observing the viewer’s in that presentation was a tremendous and gratifying experience for Swain as he witnessed the transformative effect of color on human beings. He knew it intellectually and through his controlled and meticulous systematic studies of color, but it was quite extraordinary to actually observe viewers physically and emotionally reacting to the color in the massive paintings.

In Swain’s words, the exhibition hall at the Santa Monica Museum was “full of energy”, creating a kinetic experience where viewers became animated and excited by the collision of multiple rainbows of color in one space. Entering the museum gallery was a jaw-dropping experience, not because of the unbelievable size and length of the paintings—that ranged from 9 foot by 9 foot square and 10 foot tall by 31 foot then up to and including 10 foot by 50 foot and 10 foot by 70 foot in length—but it was the awe of the entire space being filled with gradients of color.

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The paintings in the Santa Monica Museum were radiant and transformed the space, not only architecturally as the paintings literally filled each wall, but kinetically from the abundance of energy they imparted to the viewers. It was even more transformative than a space being lit by the fluorescence of any Dan Flavin or James Turrell presentation, each powerful and distinct in their own way, but generally creating more optical and illusory effects that generate technical questions and a singular sensation.

Swain’s paintings, however, have the benefit of nearly spanning the entire spectrum of color with the viewer as the ultimate catalyst (or alchemist) who actually mixes the colors via a physiological phenomenon that every human possesses, which is the brain’s ability to blend different adjacent hues as seen through the viewer’s eyes to harmonize and mix the colors (a very simplified description of a very complex physiochemical and physiological reaction to how human’s see and respond to color).

Swain’s color grid paintings with their crisscrossing gradients of saturating and desaturating colors and values across wide spectral bands become further transformed by the viewer as the viewer’s eye and brain generates hundreds and thousands of additional smaller gradients of color so that the viewer is awash in prismatic color and thus, producing an electrifying, unique and specific effect on the respondent.

As noted, the impetus for this current presentation is Swain’s ongoing exploration of not only color and color interaction, but also the tedious technical aspects of creating the paintings, including the supports. Always striving for the strongest, most durable and lightest weight supports, he has produced his first series of large paintings on aluminum instead of canvas. Interestingly, the process for applying the pigment to the aluminum support is identical and indistinguishable from the paintings on canvas as he still preps the support with gesso and applies the pigment with the same rollers.

Thus, the lightly textured surfaces with the radiance and luminosity of color is identical between the two supports. Consider it like a software upgrade to your computer’s operating system that happens in cyberspace while you sleep—you do not even notice it as you view your monitor. Yet, these technical modifications inspire Swain as he becomes energized to explore new color palettes, new compositions and, since 2014, always in monumental scale. Swain’s version of “Go Large or Go Home”.

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IMAGES: The following images are from Robert Swain’s exhibition in 2014 at the Santa Monica Museum, The Form of Color, curated by Jeffrey Uslip.

ROBERT SWAIN Immersion In Color and Visual Sensation

Robert Swain 8x12-Yellow Spectrum, 2020 Acrylic on aluminum panel 8 ft x 12 ft

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Robert Swain Untitled, 10x12-Orange+Green, 2020 Acrylic on aluminum panel 10 ft x 12 ft

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Robert Swain Untitled, 10x26, 2020 Acrylic on aluminum panel 10 ft x 26 ft

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Additional paintings available 7 x 7 foot square On aluminum supports

Robert Swain Untitled 7x7 Red Green Complement, 2019 Acrylic on aluminum panel 84 x 84”

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Robert Swain Untitled 7x7 4x20, 2020 Acrylic on aluminum panel 84 x 84”

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Robert Swain Untitled 7x7 26x6 Red Green, 2020 Acrylic on aluminum panel 84 x 84”

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Robert Swain Untitled 7x7 Red & Green Gray, 2020 Acrylic on aluminum panel 84 x 84“

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About Robert Swain:

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Robert Swain was born in Austin, Texas, in 1940, and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. He attended The American University in Washington, DC, where he later received a BA in Fine Art in 1964. During his undergraduate studies, he spent two years in Madrid, Spain, studying at the University of Madrid. In 1964, he moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and worked as a studio assistant to the American Modernist painter Karl Knaths.

Swain moved to NYC in 1965 where he permanently settled in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. In 1966, he began his first color-based work followed a year later by his first work utilizing the grid. Swain participated in his first group exhibition, Light and Line, organized by John Baldwin at the legendary Park Place Gallery in NYC in 1967. That same year he met sculptor Tony Smith who became his close friend and mentor for many years. In 1969, Swain began to develop his own color system, a project that continues until today.

Swain has exhibited his work nationally and internationally for more than 52 years. His paintings have been included in countless landmark exhibitions. He participated in the seminal exhibition Art of the Real curated by Eugene Goossen at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, in 1968. The exhibition traveled for the next two years to the Grand Palais, Paris, France; Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland; and The Tate Gallery, London, England. Swain exhibited in The Structure of Color curated by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, in 1971.

In 1974, Swain mounted his first solo museum exhibition at The Everson Art Museum, Syracuse, New York. He also participated In 1974 in Color as Language curated by Kynaston McShine and organized by the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, which traveled throughout Central and South America, including to the Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia; Museo de Arte Moderno de Sao Paulo, Brazil; Museo de Arte Moderno, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; and Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico. His work was also twice included in the Corcoran Biennial at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1969, 1998).

Swain’s work is represented in nearly 300 public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Walker Art Center, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Milwaukee Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Everson Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, among others.

He has completed major commissions for IBM, Johnson & Johnson, American Republic Insurance Company, Schering Laboratories, Harris Bank, Travenol Laboratories, Tupperware World Headquarters, and the University of Buffalo. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1989), New York State Council on the Arts, and the City University of New York.

In addition to his artistic work, Swain taught in the Department of Art & Art History at Hunter College from 1968-2014, where he educated and mentored countless generations of artists. For his teaching, he was awarded the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association in 1998. In 2010, Swain was the subject of a major 45-year survey exhibition entitled Visual Sensations: The Paintings of Robert Swain curated by Gabriele Evertz at Hunter College/Times Square Gallery, NYC. In 2014, he installed a major museum exhibition of large paintings entitled The Form of Color at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA, curated by Jeffrey Uslip. During 2015 he had a solo exhibition at Minus Space, in Brooklyn, New York, entitled Color Energy, organized by Rosanna Martinez and Matthew Deleget. In 2016 Swain exhibited a series of “Brush Stroke Painting” at the Nina Freudenheim Gallery, in Buffalo, New York entitled: The Sensations of Color. In 2017-18 he exhibited his work in a solo exhibition at the David Richard Gallery, LLC entitled Color: Theory and Affect. In 2018 his paintings were presented in Radiant Energy, a three person show with Robert Swain, Gabriele Evertz and Sanford Wurmfeld at Visual Arts Center of New. Later in 2018 Swain had a major solo presentation and installation of monumental paintings, Color Syntax, in The Lobby Gallery at 375 Hudson, New York City 10014.

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY