What is Op Art?

A closer look at the 1960s art style known to trick the eye

Flashback to 1964. In the United States, they were still reeling from the assassination of our President, escalating the Civil Rights movement, being "invaded" by British pop/rock music and, in general, pretty much done with notions of achieving idyllic lifestyles (despite that which was touted in the 1950s). Given the circumstances, it was a perfect time for a new artistic movement to burst on the scene.In October of 1964, in an article describing this new style of art, Time Magazine coined the phrase "Optical Art" (or "Op Art", as it's more commonly known). The term referenced the fact that Op Art is comprised of illusion, and often appears - to the human eye - to be moving or breathing due to its precise, mathematically-based composition.

After (and because of) a major 1965 exhibition of Op Art entitled The Responsive Eye, the public became enraptured with the movement. As a result, one began to see Op Art showing up everywhere: in print and television advertising, as LP album art and as a fashion motif in clothing and interior decoration.
Although the term was coined and the exhibition held in the mid-1960's, most people who've studied these things agree that Victor Vasarely pioneered the movement with his 1938 painting Zebra. M. C. Escher - whose style has sometimes caused him to be listed as an Op artist - created works with amazing perspectives and use of tessellations that certainly helped point the way for others. And it can be argued that none of Op Art would've been possible - let alone embraced by the public - without the prior Abstract and Expressionist movements that de-emphasized (or, in many cases, eliminated) representational subject matter.

As an "official" movement, Op Art has been given a life-span of around three years. This doesn't mean, though, that every artist ceased employing Op Art as their style by 1969. Bridget Riley is one noteworthy artist who has moved from achromatic to chromatic pieces, but has steadfastly created Op Art from its beginning to the present day. Additionally, anyone who has gone through a post-secondary fine arts program probably has a tale or two of Op-ish projects created during color theory studies.

It's also worth mentioning that, in the digital age, Op Art is sometimes viewed with bemusement. Perhaps you, too, have heard the (rather snide, in my opinion) comment: "A child with the proper graphic design software could produce this stuff." Quite true, of a gifted child, with a computer and the proper software at his or her disposal, in the 21st century. This certainly wasn't the case in the early 1960s, and the 1938 date of Vasarely's Zebra speaks for itself in this regard. Op Art represents a great deal of math, planning and technical skill, as none of it came freshly-inked out of a computer peripheral. Original, hand-created Op Art deserves respect, at the very least.

What are the key characteristics of Op Art?

• First and foremost, Op Art exists to fool the eye. Op compositions create a sort of visual tension, in the viewer's mind, that gives works the illusion of movement. For example, concentrate on Bridget Riley's Dominance Portfolio, Blue (1977) - for even a few seconds - and it begins to dance and wave in front of one's eyes. Realistically, you know any Op Art piece is flat, static and two-dimensional. Your eye, however, begins sending your brain the message that what it's seeing has begun to oscillate, flicker, throb and any other verb one can employ to mean: "Yikes! This painting is moving!"
• Because of its geometrically-based nature, Op Art is, almost without exception, non-representational.
• The elements employed (color, line and shape) are carefully chosen to achieve maximum effect.
• The critical techniques used in Op Art are perspective and careful juxtaposition of color (whether chromatic [identifiable hues] or achromatic [black, white or gray]).
• In Op Art, as in perhaps no other artistic school, positive and negative spaces in a composition are of equal importance. Op Art could not be created without both.

Gretchen Bender Exhibition

Total Recall 1987

09.01.15

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHVwG6Sn-yQ

LIVERPOOL.- Tate Liverpool presents the work of American artist Gretchen Bender (1951–2004). Bringing together a focused selection of works including Total Recall 1987, a monumental 24-monitor multi-projection screen installation, the exhibition is the first solo exhibition of Bender’s work in the UK. 

Bender came to prominence during the 1980s and was closely associated with the ‘Pictures Generation’ of artists whose work appropriated mass media imagery and its clichés for critical ends. In response to an increase of political and corporate ideologies being embedded into mass media, Bender developed a coherent and critically acclaimed body of work becoming especially renowned and celebrated for her large-scale video theatre installations and screen prints on tin signs.

 Her practice extended further to include works for commercial broadcast including music videos, often made in collaboration with the American artist Robert Longo (b. 1953), for bands including New Order, Megadeth, and Babes in Toyland. A major highlight of the exhibition is Total Recall 1987, a seminal work first shown at The Kitchen in New York, it critiques the accelerated image-flow of television and the violence of images in a society now shaped by their commodification. Total Recall’s stacked monitors each present multiplied fragments of television imagery with aggressive barrage editing and sound. The work seeks to overload the viewer’s perception by montaging imagery of Cold War-era military hardware, animated corporate logos and Hollywood film iconography, alongside commercials for consumer recording devices such as video cameras and recorders. 



If Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) is less recognized than some artists of her generation, "Tracking the Thrill" should initiate a remedy. Organized by artist Philip Vanderhyden and the Poor Farm (an experimental venue in the countryside of Wisconsin run by artists Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam, now in its fourth year), this exhibition presented a survey of Bender's video work for broadcast television, as well as two monumental, monitor-based pieces of what she called electronic theater.

Bender began exhibiting at Nature Morte in the East Village in 1983. Close with Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman and others associated with the critical strategies of appropriation, she set out to infiltrate the corporate domain of mass-media representation-and the flattening image-flow of television in particular, where politics and entertainment are conflated-so as to highlight the insidious qualities of big business's ideological operations. Her approaches for doing so, as seen here, were abstraction, acceleration and multiplication.

On the main floor were two multi-monitor videos, Wild Dead (1984) and Total Recall (1987), which have not been seen by an audience in over 20 years. Total Recall (22 minutes) was the most compelling work on view. Screened at set times in a theatrical environment, as if it were a performance with the TV sets on stage as actors, the work features quasi-narrative movements of imagery orchestrated across eight channels on 24 monitors and two projection screens. It includes a soundtrack composed by Stuart Argabright (of the electronic band Ike Yard) and animation sequences designed on a flight simulator by artist Amber Denker. In effect, it is nearly overwhelming. 

On the one hand, slowed down and multiplied fragments of commercials populate the monitors: a happy factory worker at GE who "brings good things to life," high-tech weaponry promoted in military videos, and razzle-dazzle, animated corporate logos. On the other hand, we see commercials for consumer recording technologies (cameras and camcorders) and footage from then-topical Hollywood films such asSalvador (1986) and Under Fire (1983) about photographers on assignment in places where the U.S. was supporting repressive regimes. 

As an implicit portrait of the military-industrial-media complex, Total Recall confronts the spectator with a mesmerizing critique of the violence of images in a society now predicated on their modification. In a media culture saturated by corporate self-representation, it is, Bender argued, images themselves that prevent us from seeing the reality of the world we've constructed.

Andy Warhol Exhibition

09.01.15

Transmitting Andy Warhol is the first solo exhibition of Warhol’s work in the north of England, and aims to explore his experiments with mass-produced imagery, which he ‘transmitted’ back into the public realm.

The show features some of his most recognisable artworks, including his Campbell soup cans and Marilyn Monroe diptych, along with paintings, screenprints, adverts, record sleeves, photographs and video.

Andy Warhol would have been 86 in August. His soup cans and dollar bills, Coke bottles and Brillo boxes are more than half a century old. An entire generation has grown up with his Marilyns and Maos; primary school children know how to imitate his style and he is the most widely exhibited of all 20th-century artists. A new take on Warhol, therefore, ought to be a contradiction in terms.

The show opens with a Flowers work from 1964, based on a commercial photograph of a hibiscus multiplied by four and drenched with brilliant colour. Warhol stacked these prints so high and sold them so cheap that almost anyone could buy one – as he enthusiastically pointed out; of course the exact obverse now holds true. In those days he printed directly on to shopping bags, making art with utilitarian items, and he painted utilitarian items – airmail stamps, say – on linen so that they resembled fine art images.

Gun, 1981

That is a particular joy of this show, in fact: its close focus on graphic design, illustration, print-making and other mass-reproduction media allows one to see the fine distinctions between various versions of the same image. For the multiples that characterised Warhol’s art from beginning to end are almost invariably an exercise in compare and contrast. Here’s a handgun in moody grey, pushed safely back into the past; here it is again in ice white, its cold ferocity hitting into the present.

Elvis, literally printed on a silver screen, appears twice over and the size of life; but both stars are fading out and one is on the verge of total extinction. The electric chair, in misty blue, is a throne from some ancient culture or a hideous torture device in burning orange. It is the same object, the thing itself and yet somehow different each time – just like the Brillo boxes.

Warhol said everything he made was connected with death, but this show finds his humour too. The opening gallery – nothing less than a career condensed – is full of it, not least the wonderful sight gag of a vast painting-by-numbers picture. This is the very definition of art for all, a despised thing that anyone can make raised up into a seascape of grandeur and beauty, in which the numbers remain visible. The title repeats the point: Do It Yourself.

Do it yourself (seascape) 1962

Fairytale by Douglaston

Fairy Tale, an oil on canvas, was painted in Douglaston, Long Island in 1942, and is estimated at £30,000-50,000 

06/02/15

A dark and emotional work by the German master George Grosz is to be offered in the Impressionist & Modern Art sale on 3 February at Bonhams New Bond Street, London.

Fairy Tale, an oil on canvas, was painted in Douglaston, Long Island in 1942, and is estimated at £30,000-50,000. It shows a bloated, pig-like figure gorging while a skeletal figure tugs at the tablecloth. The nightmarish atmosphere mood clearly refers to the atrocities of the Second World War.

Grosz had enjoyed great popularity in his native Germany as a prominent member of the Dada art movement, known especially for his caricatures of Berlin life in the 1920s under the Weimar Republic. But after Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933, the fear of life under the Nazi Party led him to immigrate to the United States that same year.

After his move to America, Grosz abruptly rejected his previous style of work, and caricature in general. With the outbreak of war, the horrors of news reports on the situation in Europe, as well as the decision of the United States to enter the war after the tragedy at Pearl Harbour, Grosz felt compelled to respond through art.

Having already delved into darker, apocalyptic themes, during the war years he plunged more deeply into the realms of the grotesque and his works from this period evoke the nightmarish worlds of Hieronymus Bosch or Goya. While undoubtedly a response to the horrors of the day, Fairy Tale is also touched by the spirit of Grosz’s early work, drawing on the acerbic social criticism and the allegorical tradition he had employed during his Berlin years.

The title of Fairy Tale directly refers to a book of children's stories that Grosz had illustrated in 1921, whose tales were in fact socialist moral lessons to warn children against the excesses of the post-war Weimar Republic. One of the illustrations from the book portrays a bloated, pig-like figure identified as a 'fat man'. This gorging character, who resembles the protagonist of Fairy Tale, is described by the narrator as a wealthy bourgeois who spends all his time eating and who never does any work to justify his voracious appetite.

In Fairy Tale, the ‘fat man’ is realised in grotesque and repulsive detail: slobbering, with bulging eyes, protruding tongue and a face flushed with greed. Executed in dark, atmospheric tones, the work has a nightmarish quality which is further underscored by lurking skeletal figures. One of these moves the hands of a pendulum clock, a gesture which symbolises a hastening towards death for the gluttonous man and acts as an ominous portent of Germany's fate.

The present lot was once in the collection of the celebrated Viennese actor Oskar Homolka, who purchased the painting after seeing it exhibited in New York in 1943. Like Grosz, Homolka also fled his native country when Hitler came to power, moving to Britain where he worked with movie world greats such as Alfred Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman.

Peter Krauskopf

http://peterkrauskopf.com/www.peterkrauskopf.com/Peter_Krauskopf_aktuell.html

Sarah Sze's Exhibition at Victoria Miro

30/01/15

Sarah Sze's exhibition at Victoria Miro spans all three spaces. This is the artist's third solo show with the gallery and her first presentation in Europe since representing the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale.


In the Wharf Road galleries the exhibition comprises three installations - one on each floor - that the artist has conceived as a series of different experiments that explore the construction and measurement of space, mass, time, and volume through the use of materials. Each one turns the viewer's sense of scale, gravity, and information on its head. Common objects like rocks, newspapers, and furniture mutate from something known, to something foreign, fragile, newly composed, and entirely transformed.

For the Mayfair gallery Sze has created a field of small sculptures especially for the space, each acts as a discrete model serving as their own temporary site marking a precisely composed moment. The sculptures, conceived as models of chance occurrences, highlight the tension between the effort to map, dissect and understand information, and the inevitable measure of futility in that effort.

A new series of silkscreen prints also mark a singular moment in time – 1 January 2014 – and are based on newspapers gathered from around the world on that date, with all images replaced by depictions of the midnight sky. Several works from the series are installed at both the Mayfair and Wharf Road galleries in a sequence that follows the rotation of the earth as one year turned into the next.

Sarah Sze was artist in residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2013 - 2014. The installations presented in the Wharf Road galleries, made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, have been re conceived and reconfigured especially for the London exhibition.

Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969 and lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. A MacArthur Fellow Award-winner, she is known for her large-scale installations that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings, burrow into the ground, and stretch across museums. Sze studied painting and architecture, and intersected these disciplines to arrive at sculpture, where her formal interest in light, air and movement is coupled with an intuitive understanding of composition, colour and texture.

Sze's body of work addresses questions about the fragility of human behavior, the desire to model complex systems, and the impermanence of value and memory. To explore these ideas, she utilizes myriad everyday objects in her installations. Presented as traces of human behavior, these items, released from their commonplace duty, acquire a certain vitality and ambition. Assemblages of these objects become systems, capable of renewal, aspiration and decay, or repositories of memory and value. Her work ascribes a new understanding of purpose while questioning the process of imbuing any material -- hand-made or industrially produced -- with worth.

Modern-Day Contemporaries Pt2

"The Child Who Was Never Born" by Martin Hudáčeka

Porcelain figures being dropped and photographed by Martin Klimas

"Ascension" installation by Anish Kapoor.

Sliding house installation by Alex Chinneck


For more information see: www.nationalartsociety.com