LA ABSTRACTION: 1980–2000

LA ABSTRACTION: 1980–2000 JULY 15–SEPTEMBER 4, 2021 | MODERNISM INC. | SAN FRANCISCO

LA ABSTRACTION: 1980–2000

LA ABSTRACTION: 1980–2000 LITA ALBUQUERQUE CHARLES ARNOLDI EDITH BAUMANN LARRY BELL MARY CORSE TONY DeLAP JAMES HAYWARD

SCOT HEYWOOD PETER LODATO JOHN M. MILLER ED MOSES DAVID TROWBRIDGE JAMES TURRELL ALAN WAYNE

JULY 15–SEPTEMBER 4, 2021

MODERNISM INC. | 724 ELLIS ST | SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94109

EDITH BAUMANN, Red /6 Black #3, 1989, acrylic on canvas, 53 1/2 x 53 1/2 inches previous: TONY DELAP [1927-2019], Subterfuge in Blue, 1991, wood, aluminum, acrylic, 35 x 33 x 7 1/4 inches cover: JAMES HAYWARD, Nothing’s Perfect/The Second Proof, 1997-98 acrylic on nylon on wood panel, 25 1/4 x 20 1/4 inches (detail)

Perceived Truths

By Jonathon Keats

In the late 1950s, when New York was the capital of the art world, Los Angeles was a leader in several industries that would improbably help LA to rival Manhattan in artistic significance. One was the movie business. Another was aerospace. Equally important, LA was a place where many people lived without industry or artistic pretensions, thriving instead on sun and surf, sometimes augmented with spiritual practices and psychedelics.

Over several decades, these personal and professional factors would coalesce in ways that overcame the predominance of Abstract Expressionism and offered meaningful alternatives to Minimalism and other East Coast advances in abstraction. Hard-edge painting was pushed to “fetish finish” perfection. Light and Space Art transformed museums into immersive environments. In myriad ways, Los Angeles artists combined cinematic effects with high-tech materials to create works surfacing their deep interest in perception, influenced by factors ranging from Zen Buddhism to the natural beauty surrounding them.

These advances reached full maturity in the final decades of the 20th century.

Modernism Inc. has exhibited key Los Angeles abstractionists since the gallery’s founding in 1979, representing renowned painters including Charles Arnoldi, Edith Baumann, James Hayward, Peter Lodato, David Trowbridge, and John M. Miller. LA Abstraction: 1980-2000 builds on this history, as well as the gallery’s notable 1993 restaging of Four Abstract Classicists—a landmark 1959 Los Angeles County Museum exhibition that introduced the world to the creative ferment in Los Angeles. The fourteen major abstractionists in this sweeping survey collectively reveal the diversity of abstractions that flourished some 2,500 miles from Manhattan.

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Los Angeles artists paid close attention to visual perception from the beginning. In the early ‘60s, Larry Bell began to experiment with glass, fascinated by the ways in which it both reflected and absorbed light, defying its own materiality when coated with thin films of metal. Several years later, James Turrell discovered that he could make art with pure light passing through holes in his studio walls.

Atmospheric effects were also explored by Mary Corse and Lita Albuquerque in painting and sculptural objects. For Corse, the breakthrough came when she was driving through Malibu in 1968 and saw the setting sun reflecting off a street sign. Discovering that the prismatic effect was caused by glass microspheres, she started mixing them into her paint, creating paintings that are visually transformed by the movement of the viewer or subtle changes in the weather.

Over the following decades, Light and Space Art would overtake entire galleries and spill out into the open, especially when Albuquerque and Turrell each independently adapted optical effects to the tradition of Land Art. For Albuquerque, the work has typically been ephemeral, mapping astronomical phenomena with her arrangement of pure pigment on bare Earth. In Turrell’s case, the environmental work has been a natural evolution of his use of the studio as a sort of photonic theater, a concept he has refined through purpose-built architecture (and architecture that remains unbuilt, such as Flat World), and brought to fullest fruition in a two-mile-wide volcanic cinder cone in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona.

Since 1979, Turrell has been tunneling into Roden Crater, creating chambers that augment the experience of astronomical phenomena through precise alignment of apertures with the sun, moon, and stars. Often described as an observatory, the crater is equally a space for introspection, as the viewer’s eyes are entranced by celestial light, and the mind is made to believe that the cosmic infinite is close at hand.

At the opposite extreme, many of these artists have opted to collapse space to two dimensions, imbuing the traditional picture plane with unfathomable depth. Using techniques he mastered to control the reflectivity of architectural-scale geometric glass sculptures, Larry Bell has applied thin metal films to paper, as can be seen in Mel (Me-

JAMES TURRELL, Flat World, 1989, cast hydrocal plaster and wood, 18 x 34 x 34 inches

dium Eclipse). And Albuquerque has transferred celestial geometry onto panels with pigment and gold leaf, as exemplified by Future Shadow.

Related to Light and Space, and sometimes overlapping with it, is a fixation on formal abstraction, sometimes hard-edge or imbued with a fetish finish. The Modernism exhibition includes many stimulating examples. In the case of artists such as John M. Miller, Scot Heywood, Edith Baumann, Peter Lodato, and Alan Wayne, geometric compositions hold the eye in suspense through juxtaposition of colors and shapes that are always exacting and often disarming. In the most extreme case, Miller applied precisely the same pattern of diagonal lines to hundreds of canvases between 1972 and his death in 2016, subtlely varying hues and scale to awaken the awareness of the viewer and “get to the spirit within,” as he phrased it in a 1999 interview with Coagula.

James Hayward’s canvases show equal attention to perceptual nuance, achieved through the application of countless layers of oil paint, often of different hues, to create works that appear monochromatic. In Nothing’s Perfect / The Second Proof, the monochromatic effect given at a distance shows its true colors in close proximity. Absolute 55x46 Cobalt Violet, on the other hand, will not betray the secrets of its composition, yet appears to hold the full rainbow within its thick impasto.

Hayward’s brushstrokes nearly overwhelm the picture plane with their bountiful color.

Both Tony DeLap and David Trowbridge have more deliberately pushed formal abstraction into three dimensions, compounding painted compositions with tangible objects, breaching the divide between perceptual illusion and physical reality. For instance, DeLap’s Subterfuge in Blue juxtaposes a painted circle of aluminum with a twist of natural wood, both brought to a fetish finish that conflates surface with substance.

The relentless experimentation present in all of this work is central to the work of Charles Arnoldi and Ed Moses, whose paintings round out the Modernism show. Over six decades, Arnoldi has found abstraction in the natural lines of gathered twigs, has assembled abstract compositions by segmenting painted plywood with a chainsaw, and has challenged distinctions between painting and drawing in acrylic abstractions that energetically press organic flourishes against hard-edge geometry.

LARRY BELL, Mel (Medium Ellipse), 1985, vapor drawing on paper, 30 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches

Moses was no less inventive over seven productive decades. An original member of the Cool School of pioneering Los Angeles artists (along with Tony DeLap and Larry Bell), Moses described himself as a “mutator” whose art was unified only by a commitment to mark-making in the service of aesthetic discovery. His explorations enlisted tools ranging from brushes to snaplines to squeegees, with which he investigated the material qualities of paint in relation to visual perception. In his Aix series of 1999, his squeegee made ripples reminiscent of water. In the same year, Moses was also testing the calligraphic possibilities of spray paint.

Without knowledge of his motivations, you might assume these were the work of different artists. Given his rejection of self-expression, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

The vast range of Moses’s work is a sort of synecdoche for LA abstraction more broadly.

Whether hard-edge or organic or rendered in thin coatings of metal, the works in LA Abstraction all awaken the viewer to the boundlessness of what the eye can see.

However, the works in LA Abstraction also awaken a beguiling question about Los Angeles abstraction: Is it truly abstract? In a 2016 interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Larry Bell resisted the interviewer’s characterization of his visual effects as illusions. “What

CHARLES ARNOLDI, Like a Hug, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 42 x 50 inches

I’m looking at is really happening,” he said. “There are no tricks. This is another reality, and I know it is because I can see it.”

What Bell was claiming—that perceptions are as real as glass or the city of Los Angeles—is irrefutable because we have no access to reality other than through our perceptual apparatus. This position might easily become solipsistic, were it not for the fact that Bell and other LA abstractionists are artists, and instantiate these perceptual feats for others to see as works of art. Instead of indulging in solipsism, their work evokes what everyone has in common.

In other words, this is not the skeptic’s version of perception as an impoverished state of being where the viewer is forced into a compromised position that must be accepted for want of greater means. On the contrary, the art stands as an affirmation that the biological processes by which we experience reality are as real as the reality that is experienced.

The Oxford Online Dictionary defines abstraction as “something which exists only as an idea.” Although art historians use a narrower definition (“freedom from representational qualities in art”), the representational attributes of genres such as landscape and portraiture are arguably more ideational than the qualities of light and geometric forms that are reliable physiological stimuli. A painting of the LA skyline is not only a compendium of illusionistic tricks but also more reliant on concepts (including the concept of representation) than a patterned canvas or a sheet of iridescent glass, let alone the sky seen through a chamber within the Roden Crater.

Of course, given the lack of artistic pretentions core to LA abstraction, such distinctions might also be distractingly abstract. These are works to be seen. Perception is all-encompassing.

LITA ALBUQUERQUE, Untitled, 1999-2020, 12K white gold leaf on resin, pigment on panel, 42 x 42 inches

PLATES

LITA ALBUQUERQUE

Untitled, 1999-2019, 12K white gold leaf on resin, pigment on panel, 30 x 30 inches

LITA ALBUQUERQUE

Future Shadow, 1999-2018, 24K yelow gold leaf on resin, pigment on panel, 24 x 24 inches

CHARLES ARNOLDI

Untitled, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 14 inches

CHARLES ARNOLDI

Untitled, 1994, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 11 inches

CHARLES ARNOLDI

Untitled, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 25 inches

CHARLES ARNOLDI

Untitled, 1998, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 22 inches

EDITH BAUMANN

Blue/10 Red #8, 1989, acrylic on canvas, 68 3/4 x 68 3/4 inches

EDITH BAUMANN

Red/Blue/Yellow, 1999, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 52 inches

EDITH BAUMANN

Yellow/2 Blue #4, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 70 1/8 x 63 1/2 inches

LARRY BELL

SMBKWDEN, 1993, glass with mirrored back, 30 x 30 x 5 inches

LARRY BELL

Mel (Medium Ellipse), 1985, vapor drawing on paper, 30 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches

MARY CORSE

Grey Light Grid Series, 1988, glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

TONY DeLAP [1927-2019]

Subterfuge in Blue, 1991, wood, aluminum, acrylic, 35 x 33 x 7 1/4 inches

TONY DeLAP [1927-2019]

Eusapia, 1987, cast bronze, 12 x 14 x 14 inches

TONY DeLAP [1927-2019]

Brema, 1988, cast bronze, 9 x 8 x 5 inches

JAMES HAYWARD

Nothing’s Perfect/The Second Proof, 1997-98, acrylic on nylon on wood panel, 25 1/4 x 20 1/4 inches

JAMES HAYWARD

Absolute 55x46 Cobalt Green, 1989, oil & wax on canvas on wood panel, 55 x 46 inches

SCOT HEYWOOD

Painting #46 Black, 1991, France, oil on canvas, 49 x 49 inches

SCOT HEYWOOD

Painting #41 White, 1991, France, oil on canvas, 51 x 51 inches

SCOT HEYWOOD

Painting #52 Brown, 1991, France, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

PETER LODATO

Tibetan Door #2, 1999, oil on canvas, 96 x 84 inches

PETER LODATO

Two Plus Two (Yin and Yang), 2000-01, oil on canvas, 60 x 40 inches

PETER LODATO

Two Plus Two (Vert), 2000-01, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches

JOHN M. MILLER [1939–2016]

Untitled, 1996-97, magna on raw canvas, 34 3/4 x 33 inches

JOHN M. MILLER [1939–2016]

Untitled (WSR), 1995, acrylic resin paint on raw canvas, 50 1/2 x 49 inches

ED MOSES [1926–2018]

Aix-Yaw, 1999, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

DAVID TROWBRIDGE [1945–2009]

Psalm #117, 1990, oil on linen & maple wood, 33 x 66 x 8 inches

DAVID TROWBRIDGE [1945–2009]

Gray(x3)-Ebony, 1995, oil on linen, ebony, 20 x 18 x 3 inches

DAVID TROWBRIDGE [1945–2009]

CVL-Red-Yellow-Satinwood, 1995, oil on linen, satinwood, 22 x 21 x 3 inches

JAMES TURRELL

Flat World, 1989, cast hydrocal plaster and wood, 18 x 34 x 34 inches

ALAN WAYNE

Untitled, 1980, oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 37 1/2 inches

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition LA ABSTRACTION: 1980-2000 at Modernism Inc., San Francisco July 15–September 4, 2021 Essay © 2021 Jonathon Keats © 2021 Modernism Inc., San Francisco All artworks © the artists All rights reserved.

Catalogue design: Danielle Beaulieu Special thanks to the artists, Peter Blake, Brian Gross and Jonathon Keats for their contributions.