Fine Arts

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Exhibitions embrace modern and classic

This fall, The Society of the Four Arts presents two exhibitions concurrently, offering members and guests the chance to enjoy a vibrant modern art form and closeup photography of sculptures by two Italian masters.

A Beautiful Mess: Weavers and Knotters of the Vanguard is a contemporary textile exhibition organized by the Bedford Gallery at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, CA. The Four Arts hosts its debut as a traveling exhibition, featuring a diverse selection of fiber arts including wall-hangings, installations, and monumental pieces.

“We were searching for something contemporary which featured threedimensional works,” said Rebecca A. Dunham, The Four Arts’ head of fine arts & curator. “Most of the works in this show are huge! I think most people are going to be dumbfounded by the size, by just how large these pieces are.”

The exhibition contains 19 works on display in the North, Main, and South galleries from an all-female roster of conceptual artists, showcasing twisted, tied, and braided works made from tactile and utilitarian materials like rope, yarn, clay, and wire.

“Visually, they are great works to look at,” Dunham said, “so the first level is taking in the beauty of the artwork. But they are also examples of conceptual art. Each is accompanied by a description, so the second level is finding all these deeper meanings to their shapes, forms, colors, and materials.”

A Beautiful Mess

Weavers & Knotters of the Vanguard

~ and ~

An Eye on Michelangelo and Bernini

Photos by Aurelio Amendola

ON DISPLAY Now through Sunday, January 30, 2022 Esther B. O’Keeffe Building, 102 Four Arts Plaza DAYS AND TIMES Sunday: 1 to 5 p.m. Monday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday - open to Four Arts members only: 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Kirsten Hassenfeld, Millefleur, 2019, salvaged textiles with mixed media, 78 inches

A Beautiful Mess: Weavers & Knotters of the Vanguard is organized by Bedford Gallery at the Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA.

Aurelio Amendola, detail of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (1622–25, marble, Borghese Gallery and Museum, Rome, Italy), print on baryta paper with silver salts mounted on aluminum, printed 2021, 39.4 by 27.6 inches

A complementary local show, Talking Threads: Dialogues with Weavers and Knotters, features artists from Fiber Artists-Miami Association, who employ the same textile processes as the artists in A Beautiful Mess. In addition to 11 selected works, including two on display in the Philip Hulitar Sculpture Garden, FAMA contributed educational displays, examples of materials and tools, a loom, videos, and a hands-on interactive art installation.

A Beautiful Mess also includes a postcard souvenir to take home, a personal collectible from the booming world of fiber and textile arts.

“Museums are collecting more of them, showcasing artists who are making this kind of art,” Dunham said. “If you go to art fairs you are seeing a lot more of the fiber arts than you used to. Traditionally people who worked with ropes and fabrics were labeled a craft and not fine art, but this exhibition showcases how these materials can be used to make fine art – and how we should consider textile arts and fiber arts to be a fine art, just like painting or sculpture.”

The Four Arts second exhibition, An Eye on Michelangelo and Bernini: Photographs by Aurelio Amendola gives attendees the chance to view the fine art of sculpting up close in the East Gallery.

Thirty stunning black and white photographs by Aurelio Amendola, a prolific contemporary photographer from Italy, feature details of some of Michelangelo’s most beloved pieces — David, Pietà, Moses, Victory, and figures from the Tombs of Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici and Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici — alongside details of Bernini’s Damned Soul, David, Apollo and Daphne, Rape of Proserpina, and Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius.

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An Eye on Michelangelo and Bernini is organized by The Society of the Four Arts

Philip Rylands, Michelangelo Sculptor

Monday, November 29, 2021 at 3 p.m. $20 ■ No charge for Four Arts members Walter S. Gubelmann Auditorium

A titan of the Italian High Renaissance, the extreme virtuosity of Michelangelo’s technique in sculpture and his style in painting and architecture made him also a source for Italian Mannerism. Michelangelo is arguably the most famous sculptor that has ever lived.

Philip Rylands, Bernini Sculptor

Monday, December 13, 2021 at 3 p.m. $20 ■ No charge for Four Arts members Walter S. Gubelmann Auditorium

The greatest of all the Italian Baroque sculptors, Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved with a skill that surpassed Michelangelo in his liberation of sculptural form from the restraints of the marble block and in the invention of theatrical conceits that combine sculpture with real light, space, and architecture.

Online: Aurelio Amendola

Program available at www.fourarts.org

Enjoy six short videos as the artist shares anecdotes about working with contemporary artists Alberto Burri, Giorgio de Chirico, Jannis Kounellis, Marino Marini, Claudio Parmiggiani, and Andy Warhol.

Curator lecture: Emilee Enders

Monday, January 3, 2022 at 11 a.m. No charge ■ Reservations required Dixon Education Building

Join Emilee Enders, Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at Bedford Gallery, to learn about the development of A Beautiful Mess and the processes and materials the artists used to create their stunning works. Enders will also share histories about the artists and the societal norms and traditions of the fiber arts.

Aurelio Amendola, detail of Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498-99, St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome), print on baryta paper with silver salts mounted on aluminum, printed 2021, 27.6 by 39.4 inches

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“This exhibition is about the two sculptors, the Renaissance Michelangelo and the Baroque Bernini, and Amendola’s ability to capture details of these sculptures,” Dunham said. “The black and white photography of these sculptures is a great exercise playing around with light and shadow.”

Printed in large format on aluminum, the photographs unveil the style and intensity of the Italian masters from the photographer’s personal point of view. This exhibition was organized by The Society of Four Arts in collaboration with Aurelio Amendola and his studio in Pistoia, Italy, and designed by Cesare and Carlotta Mari of Panstudio Architetti Associati, Bologna, Italy. The East Gallery has been redesigned with additional interior walls and a new lighting system to display the photographs, chosen from Amendola’s digital collection.

“Frequent visitors will notice that the gallery physically looks different,” Dunham said. “And these artworks didn’t exist in these printed and framed versions until this exhibition – it’s all for us! The show is not going to be traveling to any other venues, so this is a one-of-a-kind experience.”

Wall labels will provide context for the works by featuring fulllength images of the sculptures and providing background information about the subjects and artists. A free exhibition catalogue will be available. Enhance your experience by watching six short videos of Amendola describing his interactions with modern artists at www.fourarts.org.

These exhibitions are generously supported by an anonymous Foundation, Thomas and Jody Gill, and Hindman Auctions. The Society of the Four Arts is grateful to The Hearst Corporation and its Foundation Director Gilbert C. Maurer for generosity that sustains all Four Arts programming.

No charge ■ Open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., weather permitting No reservations needed ■ For more information, go to www.fourarts.org

Walk all around Pepper’s Crispina Senior II

The Society of the Four Arts has installed a major new acquisition, Crispina Senior II by Beverly Pepper, in the north end of the Philip Hulitar Sculpture Garden.

The celebrity of Pepper, who died aged 97 in 2020, is surging. Her long and distinguished career as a sculptor goes back at least to 1962 when she was included by Giovanni Carandente in one of the most celebrated sculpture exhibitions of the 20th century, Sculture nella città at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. She was the only woman of her generation to work in steel and iron sculpture.

Crispina Senior II was one of a small number of works that were in preparation at the time of Pepper’s death. It was fabricated in Todi, in the beautiful region of Umbria, Italy. It is created for outdoor exhibition, and presents a single majestic compound curve of tapering steel. It has the purely sculptural quality of 360-degree viewpoints: slender and linear from some angles, and substantial and planar from others. It also has an unusual textural component of seemingly corroded surface, an invention of the artist.

“I work until I feel a space outside the sculpture exists,” Pepper said in 1975. “I’ll keep going until there’s something I can’t explain that’s there. But I have no idea how one puts it in. But I don’t think content is something that you achieve mentally ― it is not a mental achievement.”

Beverly Pepper (1922–2020), Crispina Senior II, 2014, fabricated 2021, Cor-ten steel. Photo by David Darby

So, Pepper placed value on the space that the sculpture commands around itself, between it and the gaze of the viewer, and on the way the sculpture configures that space. Secondly, the “content” is intuitive, emotive, and not constructed in the mind in such a way that it is a surrogate for words. Crispina Senior II evades description in terms of Euclidean geometry: its curves shift away from a pure circular arc in all three dimensions, and we are given the pleasure of viewing a form that is a unique contribution to the world of shapes. This evasion ― from abstract pure geometry ― opens the door to sentiment, to an empathetic response on the part of the viewer.

“I wish to make an object that has a powerful physical presence, but is at the same time inwardly turned, seeming capable of intense self-absorption,” Pepper said. Beverly Pepper’s sculptures are best experienced slowly, over a duration of time, by circling fully around them. Crispina, in a smaller version, was part of the series of works in which she explored variants of open circles and partial circles created for her exhibition at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome in 2014-15.

The arrival of Beverly Pepper’s Crispina Senior II is a first step in the Four Arts’ project to refine both the way the sculptures in the Philip Hulitar Garden are viewed and the quality, variety and importance of the works themselves.

Beverly Pepper at the Ara Pacis Museum, Rome, 2014. Photo by Elisa Veschini