calendario eventi  :: 

X

15/3/2007

Leon Polk Smith

Louis Stern Fine Arts, Hollywood

Constellation Paintings

Though he is most frequently referenced as one of the founding fathers of New York based Hard Edge painting, and also as one of the most widely revered artists working in the twentieth century, Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996) never lost his connection to the raw-boned vistas of his native Oklahoma. Perhaps Smith’s tireless contemplation of space and its myriad geometries, defined by the purest, boldest and truest of colors, has its roots in his Cherokee heritage. Whatever the genesis, thirty-plus years after their creation, Smith’s Constellation Paintings remain as fresh-eyed, invigorating and revelatory as ever.

Smith, "discovered" art, his lifelong vocation, during his senior year of college in 1934. Initially he pursued Mondrian-inspired rectilinear abstractions. Then in 1954, he began dividing the canvas into two areas, working with the circular tondo and then allowing the color to reinvent the shapes/spaces of the canvas. Somehow Smith had, miraculously, caused the flat surface of the canvas to appear to curve. Working with strong rich reds, forest greens and butter yellows, edged in by black, Smith invented forms that appeared to move with the effortlessness of space itself. The Constellation Paintings, executed in the late sixties through the mid seventies, take these spatial experiments one step further. The series consists of boldly colored forms laced together in such meticulous and inventive constructs as to redefine the space of walls themselves. All in all, they create, with a minimum of any formulaic design, an extraordinary sensation of motion powered by a resplendent sun-laced palette: a veritable heaven of color and line in a singularly eloquent universe invented by a true American original.

Opening Reception: Friday, March 16, 6 – 9PM

Louis Stern Fine Arts
9002 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood

stampa

permanent link