Luminous Abstraction: Making Their Mark II
This section showcases works that use light as a material, featuring California Light and Space artists alongside pieces that explore pouring and stroking techniques in dialogue.
By Shah Garg Foundation
Pat Steir, For Philadelphia Three, 2013
For Philadelphia ThreeShah Garg Foundation
Luminous abstraction
This section of the exhibition focused on a group of works that use light as a material, with remarkable examples by California Light and Space artists in dialogue with artworks that use strategies of pouring and stroking.
For Philadelphia Three For Philadelphia Three (2013) by Pat SteirShah Garg Foundation
Steir's exploration of Philadelphia's artistic heritage
Raised near Philadelphia, Pat Steir benefited greatly from that city’s cultural institutions: paintings by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Vincent van Gogh shaped her early artistic education.
One of three
For Philadelphia Three is the third in a trio of works named for the city, it seems to evoke the stone-work of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in its solidity and its yellow tones.
Pioneering fiber art
Lenore Tawney was a renowned pioneer of fiber art, whose revolutionary approach to weaving helped to determine the course of the movement in the 1960s.
Over a five-decade career, which began when she was in her 40s and ended with her death at 100, she produced weavings, sculptural installations, and boxlike assemblages alongside works on paper, including drawings and postcard collages.
Alquimia Plata 6(B)Shah Garg Foundation
An innovator of off-loom fiber art
Emerging during the height of the fiber art movement in the mid-1960s, Olga de Amaral developed a facility for off-loom constructions. The geometric quality of Amaral’s early work ensured her importance as a key figure in the development of Latin American abstraction.
Alquimia Plata 6(B) is a wall hanging constructed of more than one thousand individual rectangular tiles, woven from linen and arranged into vertical columns. To make the work, the artist secured each tile into place before applying gesso to smooth the surfaces, then topped that with acrylic paint and gold and silver leaf.
The Light and Space Movement of the 1960s
Helen Pashgian is best known as a member of the Light and Space movement that emerged in Southern California in the 1960s. Over a five-decade career, she produced sculptures that explore the possibilities of light as both medium and subject.
Color is fundamental to Pashgian’s practice, and she chooses each hue carefully on the basis of its ability to reflect or refract light in a particular way. Untitled (orange) is made by heating acrylic sheets at high temperatures before wrapping the softened material around wood molds to create a double elliptical form.
Untitled (orange)Shah Garg Foundation
Continually mysterious
“The double elliptical shape is continually mysterious because as you move around it whatever you see inside distorts, dissolves, and reappears."
Continue exploring the collection in Making Their Mark III: Pixelated Abstraction.
