ABSTRACT GEOMETRY
by Agnes Martin
"Born in 1912, and having long outlived all her contemporaries of the Abstract Expressionist generation, Agnes Martin has created a four-decade-long body of work that could equally be described as ahead of its time and as timeless. In the mid-1960s, Martin was applauded as a herald of the cool geometric Minimalism that was emerging in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism, but she herself declined that claim, for she saw the Minimalist approach as impersonal and dispassionate. Her own abstractions use a combination of ideal geometry and the lightest touch of the artist’s hand to achieve a pitch of emotion and feeling." —Michael Govan, catalog essay from Dia Center retrospective
Barry Le Va
"If you want to know where the tattered old banner of avant-garde aspiration still waves at the end of the 70s, this is apparently its current address."
Hilton Kramer, "Barry Le Va: Four Consecutive Installations and Drawings 1967-1978," The New York Times, January 5, 1979.
Barry Le Va’s studies in architecture have contributed to developing his sensitivity toward space, presence, volume, form, force fields, relations, and tension. He starts with a set of elements and an open score or manuscript that he follows, and proceeds by testing things out, eliminating, making adjustments, and producing new arrangements. Le Va says that, "There’s no sense in worrying about what it’s going to look like beforehand. If you have your elements that means something, it’s arranging them to focus in on what you want them to do: …it’s closer to musical composition."
Jo Baer
Born in Seattle, Washington, 1929, as Josephine Gail Kleinberg. Educated at University of Washington, Seattle. Majors in biology and takes first year painting and drawing art courses. In 1950, works during spring and summer in Kibbutz in Israel. Moves to New York City. Attends the New School for Social Research, New York, NY, and studies with the Graduate Faculty in Gestalt Psychology. 1962 Begins grid paintings.
Josef Albers
"Josef Albers was born March 19, 1888, in Bottrop, Germany. After attending the K�nigliche Kunstschule in Berlin from 1913 to 1915, he was certified as an art teacher. Albers studied art in Essen and Munich before entering the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920. There, he initially concentrated on glass painting and in 1929, as a journeyman, he reorganized the glass workshop. In 1923, he began to teach the Vorkurs, a basic design course. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, he became a professor. In addition to working in glass and metal, he designed furniture and typography.
After the Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933, Albers emigrated to the United States In 1949, Albers began his Homage to the Square series.
He lectured and taught at various colleges and universities throughout the United States and from 1950 to 1958 served as head of the design department at Yale University, New Haven. In addition to painting, printmaking, and executing murals and architectural commissions, Albers published poetry, articles, and books on art. Thus, as a theoretician and teacher, he was an important influence on generations of young artists." From the Guggenheim biography
Frank Stella
"Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1936 and studied at Princeton University. Stella’s auspicious start in New York, only a year after his graduation from Princeton, was an exhibit of the Black Paintings of 1959-60. Viewed as a precursor to Minimalism, these pivotal works led to his inclusion in Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art and the notice of its director, Alfred Barr, who purchased a painting, The Marriage of Squalor and Reason. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Stella’s work was included in several landmark exhibits of abstract painting including Geometric Abstraction, Whitney Museum (1962); Toward a New Abstraction, Jewish Museum (1963); Dokumenta 4 (1968); New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-70, Metropolitan Museum of Art (1970); Structure of Color, Whitney Museum (1971).
In the 70s, Stella’s work moved toward three-dimensional paintings on shaped canvases and later toward wall constructions with multiple components, ever projecting further from their supports. Stella’s second retrospective at MOMA in 1987 concluded with a series of daring reliefs based on Melville’s Moby Dick. These works further blurred any boundary between paintings and sculpture.
In 1983-84 Stella gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University. These lectures, later published under the title Working Space, marked a critical juncture for the artist. A spirited defense of abstraction, they could well sum up Stella’s approach to painting and have acted as a manifesto for his work since." Bio from Locks Gallery
Sol LeWitt
"Clarity, beauty, playfulness. Simplicity, logic, openness. The words that come to mind when describing the work of Sol LeWitt resonate with essential aesthetic and intellectual values. His works are straightforward and legible. Yet, upon closer observation and consideration, even those that initially appear direct and obvious reveal complex subtlety in decision-making. Intellectual substance is paired with visual delight, both of which seep into one’s consciousness."
"In 1960 LeWitt took a job at The Museum of Modern Art, working first at the book counter and later as a night receptionist. He met other young artists working there (Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, Robert Ryman, and Scott Burton), placing him in the midst of a community of young artists searching for a new direction "that would lead away from the pervasive but useless ideas of Abstract Expressionism." For LeWitt and his colleagues, Abstract Expressionism had become, by the early 1960s, an entrenched style that offered few new creative possibilities for young artists. In contrast to the psychologically loaded brushwork of Abstraction Expressionism, LeWitt began to create works that utilized simple and impersonal forms, exploring repetition and variations of a basic form or line as a way to achieve works of a complex and satisfying nature."
"Perhaps most importantly, he evolved a working method for creating artworks based on simple directions, works that could be executed by others rather than the artist himself."
from the SFMoMA retrospective
Edna Andrade
"Since the 1960s, Edna Andrade (b. 1917) has created a body of paintings that pursues a formal logic based in geometric abstraction and opticality. Influenced by modernist painters such as Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Josef Albers, Andrade’s paintings incorporate a pared-down vocabulary of shapes, such as circles, triangles, squares, and pentagons and a deceptively simple color palate made more complex through the works’ compositions. ICA’s exhibition will focus on paintings from 1963 through 1986: a period when Andrade followed a distinctly optical course, and one which historically coincides with Op Art, Minimalism, and Pattern and Decoration Painting — movements in art that relate to the pure pursuit of geometric and abstract design. Concerned more with the psychology of perception than with expression or narrative, Andrade has written, "with the new art, paintings are no longer to be looked at — or into… They possess positive action." That is to say, they create an active, bodily, and visual engagement with their viewers. In many ways, Andrade’s work from this period may be seen to presage our own technological Zeitgeist’s fascination with data, repetition, and images as built perceptual machines." From the ICA retrospective
Bridget Riley
"Riley’s paintings exist on their own terms. Her subject matter is restricted to a simple vocabulary of colors and abstract shapes. These form her starting point and from them she develops formal progressions, color relationships and repetitive structures. The effect is to generate sensations of movement, light and space: visual experiences which also have a strong emotional and even visceral resonance.
Though her work is abstract, such experiences seem surprisingly familiar. During her childhood, when she lived in Cornwall, she formed an acute responsiveness to natural phenomena. In particular, the effects of light and color in the landscape made a deep impression. Though her mature work does not proceed from observation, it is nevertheless connected with the experience of nature."
From the Tate Britain
