Exposition Art Blog: November 2018

Bill Bollinger - Post Minimalism Art

Bill Bollinger (July 15, 1939 – May 27, 1988) was an American artist. In the late 1960s, he was one of the foremost sculptors of his time, routinely mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. His work can be categorized as minimalist or postminimalist art..In his works, Bill Bollinger made frequent use of standard industrially fabricated products. The artist explained his approach: “I only do what it is necessary to do. There is no reason to use color, to polish, to bend, to weld, if it is not necessary to do so.”For the Channel Pieces from 1965 to 1968, he joined together extruded aluminum profiles to create works with additive and rhythmic properties. These were followed by the Pipe Pieces made from aluminum pipes held together with fittings and the Rope Pieces, consisting of a rope stretched between two terminal points within the exhibition space. In the Cyclone Fence Pieces, Chain-Link Fence Pieces, Wire Pieces and Screen Pieces from 1968 and 1969, Bollinger utilized commercially available wire mesh and netting. They allowed him to lend expression to the painterly and graphic questions of space and the fundamental laws of physics. Four works from 1968 – a Rope Piece, a Wire Piece and two Pipe Pieces – were included in the legendary 1969 exhibition “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form” curated by Harald Szeemann at Kunsthalle Bern.In the Graphite Pieces (1969–1970), Bollinger spread graphite dust over the floor, leaving clear traces of the process of creation while incorporating the sense of openness and expandability that was so important to Bollinger. The ready-made character of Bollinger’s works is especially apparent in the Droplights (hanging lamps) from 1969. Later works with floating tree trunks and barrels show Bollinger’s affinity for water. In 1973, he began working in cast iron. Wikipedia

Noah Purifoy - Outdoor Desert Art Museum

Noah S. Purifoy (August 17, 1917 – March 5, 2004) was an African-American visual artist and sculptor, co-founder of the Watts Towers Art Center, and creator of the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum.He lived and worked most of his life in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California. Purifoy was the first African American to enroll in Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) as a full-time student and earned his BFA in 1956, just before his fortieth birthday. He is best known for his assemblage sculpture, including a body of work made from charred debris and wreckage collected after the Watts Riots of August 1965.Wikipedia
"His earliest body of sculpture, constructed out of charred debris from the 1965 Watts rebellion, was the basis for 66 Signs of Neon, the landmark 1966 group exhibition on the Watts riots that traveled throughout the country. As a founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, Purifoy knew the community intimately. His 66 Signs of Neon, in line with the postwar period’s fascination with the street and its objects, constituted a Duchampian approach to the fire-molded alleys of Watts. This strategy profoundly impacted artists such as David Hammons, John Outterbridge and Senga Nengudi. For the 20 years that followed the rebellion, Purifoy dedicated himself to the found object, and to using art as a tool for social change. In the late 1980s, after 11 years of public policy work for the California Arts Council, where Purifoy initiated programs such as Artists in Social Institutions, which brought art into the state prison system, Purifoy moved his practice out to the Mojave desert. He lived for the last 15 years of his life creating ten acres full of large-scale sculpture on the desert floor. Constructed entirely from junked materials, this otherworldly environment is one of California’s great art historical wonders."(.noahpurifoy.com)

Jean-Paul Mousseau

Jean-Paul Mousseau (January 1, 1927 – February 7, 1991) was a Quebec artist. He was a student of Paul-Émile Borduas and a member of the Automatist school. He was a founding member of the Association on Non-Figurative Artists of Montreal. He designed murals for the Hydro-Québec building and the Peel Metro in Montreal. Jean-Paul Mousseau studied painting at the age of thirteen while at the College Notre-Dame in Montreal under Frère Jérome (1940–45). He became a student of Paul-Emile Borduas at the Ecole du Meuble, Montreal. He was a member of the group of painters known as the Automatistes. In 1948, he was one of the signatories of the Refus global manifesto.At the end of the 1950s he was one of the first Quebec artists who saw the necessity of integrating art into the urban environment. His most important contributions are original murals and other collaborations with architects. Wikipedia

Roman Empire - Byzantine art

The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul, which had been founded as Byzantium). It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. During most of its existence, the empire was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in Europe. Both "Byzantine Empire" and "Eastern Roman Empire" are historiographical terms created after the end of the realm; its citizens continued to refer to their empire simply as the Roman Empire (Greek: Βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων, tr. Basileia Rhōmaiōn; Latin: Imperium Romanum), or Romania, and to themselves as "Romans".Wikipedia

Byzantine art

Byzantine art refers to the body of Christian Greek artistic products of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, as well as the nations and states that inherited culturally from the empire. Though the empire itself emerged from Rome's decline and lasted until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the start date of the Byzantine period is rather clearer in art history than in political history, if still imprecise. Many Eastern Orthodox states in Eastern Europe, as well as to some degree the Muslim states of the eastern Mediterranean, preserved many aspects of the empire's culture and art for centuries afterward.
A number of states contemporary with the Byzantine Empire were culturally influenced by it, without actually being part of it (the "Byzantine commonwealth"). These included the Rus, as well as some non-Orthodox states like the Republic of Venice, which separated from the Byzantine empire in the 10th century, and the Kingdom of Sicily, which had close ties to the Byzantine Empire and had also been a Byzantine possession until the 10th century with a large Greek-speaking population persisting into the 12th century. Other states having a Byzantine artistic tradition had oscillated throughout the Middle Ages between being part of the Byzantine empire and having periods of independence, such as Serbia and Bulgaria. After the fall of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in 1453, art produced by Eastern Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman Empire was often called "post-Byzantine." Certain artistic traditions that originated in the Byzantine Empire, particularly in regard to icon painting and church architecture, are maintained in Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia and other Eastern Orthodox countries to the present day. Wikipedia