What exactly is a Mohl ip?
James Turrell's tall glass piece, given as a gift by Contemporary Forum to honor the Ellen and Howard C. Katz Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art at Phoenix Art Museum, has been officially entitled Mohl ip by the artist. This Korean term is synonymous with "spinther", "bidu", or "jot." It refers to the visual purple (actually pale blue) seen with the eyes closed in the early stages of meditation. The "Light Inside" (Quaker Terminology) that congeals, spreads then dissolves only to reappear when one concentrates upon it. A visual mantra.
In summary, Mohl ip is a transliteration of the Korean term that alludes to the visual purple or pale blue light seen with the eyes closed in the early stages of meditation.
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Manuel Neri, Arcos de Geso
2006, bronze and oil-based pigments
Collection of Phoenix Art Museum
Gift of the Riva Yares Foundation
An extraordinarily generous gift from the Riva Yares Foundation has placed a Manuel Neri painted bronze at the entrance to the Morrell Promenade adjacent to the Greenbaum Lobby at Phoenix Art Museum.
"Manuel Neri's unique style of creating a figure and then painting it with expressionistic brush strokes of vibrant colors has brought him international recognition. The idea of painting the sculpted figure actually goes back to the ancient Greeks who, as it was only recently discovered, often painted beautifully rendered marble figures with gaudy and garish dyes and paints. Later, long after the colors had worn off, historians focused on the classic beauty and idealism with which the sculptures were done and missed the point of the original intention.
Manuel Neri has updated this original concept and combined it with the expressionistic qualities of the contemporary painters of his time while giving the viewer something entirely new to think about – color and form in a three-dimensional space. He often uses the same model in a wide variety of poses to create a piece which acts like a painter's canvas and depending on his disposition at the time, each work has the unique distinction of being painted differently. Neri has effectively combined the best of both creative spheres by giving the viewer a striking sculptural form to deal with while at the same time enhancing it with a very painterly sensibility, abstractly superimposing one onto the other."
Contemporary Forum is indebted to the Riva Yares Foundation, its friend for many years, for this unique contribution to the Museum's contemporary collection.
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Helen Frankenthaler, Lush Spring
1975, acrylic on canvas
Museum purchase with funds from the
National Endowment for the Arts
Celebrate the return of Lush Spring by Helen Frankenthaler; it is on view on the main floor of the Ellen & Howard C. Katz Wing after being on loan for eight years in Washington, D.C. Lush Spring was featured in Architectural Digest magazine in an article on the Vice-President’s official residence at Number One Observatory Circle. The house, built in 1893, is owned and operated by the United States Navy. In 1974, it was designated by Congress as the official vice-presidential compound. Architectural Digest photographed the first floor which was decorated with a “sense of history and stunning artworks.” A Gilbert Stuart portrait of John Adams hung in the library of the home. Lush Spring by Helen Frankenthaler, on loan from Phoenix Art Museum, dominated the living room with its abstract statement of luminous color and airy quality. Lush Spring was also featured on the Today Show this year during a tour of the Vice-President’s residence.
Phoenix Art Museum Collection Highlights book describes the work: “Helen Frankenthaler is credited with inventing a technique known as ‘stain painting.’ In 1952, at a time when Jackson Pollock was heralded for his ‘drip paintings,’… Frankenthaler devised a related process. In contrast to the densely painted surfaces of paintings by Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, Frankenthaler’s stained surfaces were light and airy and presented a lyrical alternative to the aggressive emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism.
…Over the years, Frankenthaler has explored numerous approaches to staining. While her earliest paintings were the result of rubbing paint directly into raw canvas, Lush Spring is one of the first paintings made by saturating the surface with a single color, in this case green, before developing the composition further. Frankenthaler, who calls this process ‘tinting,’ has commented that a tinted surface provides the artist with a ‘ready-made plane’ that is different from that of raw canvas. Several shades of green, each composed of different pigments from the others, were employed in making Lush Spring.
…Frankenthaler usually chooses a title for a painting based on her personal response to the abstract imagery once it is completed. Lush Spring was painted at her studio on Long Island Sound, and its green palette suggests the landscape of the area during springtime.”
--- Prepared by Gigi Jordan, docent
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Jennifer Steinkamp, Mike Kelley 13
2008, computer video installation
Collection of Phoenix Art Museum
Museum Purchase with funds provided
by Contemporary Forum (ArtPick 2008)
Jennifer Steinkamp's homage to her teacher Mike Kelley, an artist who is considered to be one of the grandfathers of the LA art scene, was ArtPick’s 2008 winner and is now on display on the upper level of the Ellen and Howard C. Katz Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art at Phoenix Art Museum. The work is cutting edge digital technology – not video – and occupies a very large wall. The artist traces her artistic heritage back to the west coast based light and space artists of the 1960s such as James Turrell and Robert Irwin. However, "new media artist Jennifer Steinkamp uses very special effects to make fake nature boggling the eye and fooling the brain."
The ArtPick winning selection is a tree that seems bewitched, like something out of a fairy tale. The tree trunk appears anchored, but the branches swirl to and fro while the tree’s flowers and leaves change reflecting a change in seasons. To make her trees, Steinkamp says she starts with the image of a maple, then reworks the bark, leaves, branches and flowers so it doesn't look like any identifiable tree. "Few artists have taken nature and technology and created the feeling of the uncanny the way Steinkamp has. In fact, Jennifer's trees seem a little scary." Steinkamp's work can be found in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
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Josiah McElheny, The Last Scattering Surface
2006, handblown glass, chrome plated aluminum,
rigging, electric lighting
Museum purchase with funds provided by
Jan and Howard Hendler
Josiah McElheny was born in Boston and educated at the Rhode Island School of Design. He then studied with premier glassblowers throughout the world.
His significant exhibitions and projects have been shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Seattle's Henry Art Gallery, the Whitney Biennial, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco's De Young Museum, SITE Santa Fe and Phoenix Art Museum on the upper level of the Katz Wing.
The Last Scattering Surface is McElheny's second piece in his Big Bang Series which describes the creation of the universe. His first Big Bang Sculpture, An End to Modernity, is a dazzling and daunting complex assemblage that may be interpreted as a crystal chandelier, hung incongruously low so that its core is at eye level, or just as appropriately, the viewer may see An End To Modernity as a scientifically accurate representation of the expansion of the universe following the big bang. An End to Modernity is in the collection of the Tate Modern in London.
The Last Scattering Surface is Josiah McElheny's second piece in the Big Bang series. This ten-foot spherical sculpture of gleaming metal and glass also floats just inches from the floor, and it refers to both the history of modernism and the science of the Big Bang. But the poetry of the title of The Last Scattering Surface comes directly from the scientific concepts the sculpture represents. The last scattering surface is the scientific term used to describe the moment when the universe transitioned from the opaque to the transparent, when the light particles that filled the hot early cosmos decoupled from normal matter and began to travel freely through space. Subtle variations in the intensity of this light were the result of fluctuations in temperature and density and these seeds of variation have grown by gravity into the galaxies, stars and planets that fill the universe today.
The Last Scattering Surface attempts to explain the creation of the universe by postulating that it emerged rapidly from an extremely dense state 14 billion years ago. Physical evidence led support to the theory in 1965, and McElheny's great leap of the imagination is to equate this theory philosophically and aesthetically with the contemporaneous appearance, in the mid 1960s of minimalism in the world of ideas and art. McElheny marries these two intellectual events into an object based on the designs for the chandelier commissioned for New York City's Metropolitan Opera House in 1965 which was meant to be a minimalist tour de force and to have a galactic appearance.
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Chuck Close, Philip Glass State 1, 2005, Jacquard tapestry
Gift of Barry Berkus and Family
Stepping off the elevator on the uppermost level of the Katz Wing is a whole new experience. There, in all its glory, is a tapestry by Chuck Close portraying the composer Philip Glass. After two years of tests and refinements, Chuck Close has completed his first tapestry with the Magnolia Tapestry (Oakland, California) project. This monumental portrait is modeled after a photograph of Close's long time friend, composer Philip Glass. Close is known for such portraits, which he creates by translating photographs into immense works of art using a grid and a module: a stroke of paint, a fingerprint and now, a stitch.
The black and white format is a revisitation of Close's 1969 series in black and white, where the now iconic portrait of a young Philip Glass first appeared. From a distance, this contemporary depiction of Glass appears photorealisitc: the viewer can clearly see the changes time has worked upon his face. Up close, the image dissolves into an abstract field of woven color and texture.
Philip Glass State 1 was woven in Belgium with a ten-foot-wide, double-head electronic Jacquard on a Dornier loom. The tapestry is here on a long-term loan, but it's a piece you will want to see again and again.
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Frederick Hammersley, Even #3, 1962, oil on linen
On loan to Phoenix Art Museum by anonymous donor
ArtPick 2007 has now officially ended with three works of art that were ArtPick choices on display at Phoenix Art Museum.
Richard Misrach's Untitled #1179-04 (Beach Series), ArtPick 2007 winner, was the first to be displayed. The second piece now on display in the Hendler Gallery is Still Life by Waltercio Caldas which was acquired by Phoenix Art Museum with funds donated by Miriam and Yefim Sukhman. And recently, a private donor purchased Frederick Hammersley's Even #3, and it is currently on loan to Phoenix Art Museum. It can be seen in the Anderman Gallery on the main level of the Katz wing.
Frederick Hammersley, born in Salt Lake City in 1919, is one of America's best known Hard-Edge
painters. He studied at art schools in Los Angeles and began teaching in the 1950s. He taught at Pomona College during the 1960s, and in the 1970s joined the faculty at the University of New Mexico. After giving up teaching to devote his full energy to painting, Hammersley remained in New Mexico.
The 89-year-old painter is one of four artists whose landmark work in 1950s Los Angeles came to be known as the school of Hard Edge Painting. In contrast to the contemporaneously New York Abstract Expressionists whose work relied in part on spontaneity and chance, Hammersley and his cohorts intellectualized the interplay of geometric forms and colors. What is surprising is the renewed level of interest in Hammersley's geometric forms and colors which hasn't changed significantly in almost half a century. "Geometric paintings were unpopular. I was unpopular -- invisible for years," Hammersley says. Not anymore. Hammersley has exhibited at every major art museum across America and is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Museum of Art, Santa Fe.
Hammersley's abstract work is intuitive. He has been particularly interested in resolving oppositions between contrasting color and shape in works such as Even #3. This is not to say his paintings lack emotion, rather the opposite is apparent in the dynamism of simple mirrored forms in opposing fields of color.
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Waltercio Caldas, Still Life (Black Series), 2005
stainless steel, granite, wool yarn and glass
Collection of Phoenix Art Museum
Museum purchase with funds provided by
Miriam and Yefim Sukhman
It's a great joy to announce that as a result of ArtPick 2007 an additional work of art, a sculpture by Waltercio Caldas, has been added to the collection of Phoenix Art Museum. Funds have been provided for this acquisition by past Phoenix Art Museum Trustee Miriam Sukhman and Yefim Sukhman.
Waltercio Caldas is a mid-career sculptor emerging on the world stage. He was born in 1946 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and studied with painter Ivan Serpa (two works in Phoenix Art Museum collection) in the 1960s. He still lives and works in Rio while showing his work internationally.
Precise and geometric, Caldas' sculpture does not fit with any specific style. It evokes an ethereal, poetic beauty while consisting of industrial materials. The sculptures from the artists "Black Series" force these materials into intimate relationships with each other, showing they are not as different as one might think. The heavy granite floats, the yarn seems to have the same property as the steel rods and the transparent glass works as a mirror.
Caldas represented Brazil in the 1997 Venice Biennial and the 1996 Sao Paulo Biennial. In 2007, his work was again included in the Venice Biennial. A retrospective exhibition will be shown in Brazil next year and will travel to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Nueu Galerie, Kassel.
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Richard Misrach, Untitled #1179 (Beach Series), 2004
Chromogenic color print
Museum purchase with funds provided by Contemporary Forum (ArtPick 2007 Winner)
Untitled #1179 (Beach Series) was chosen as first choice for ArtPick 2007 and is the newest acquisition for the contemporary collection at Phoenix Art Museum. It may be seen on the main level of the Katz Wing.
Richard Misrach, one of America's leading photographers over the past thirty years, has written about his current series of monumental photographs, "On The Beach:"
"I was drawn to the fragility and grace of the human figure in the landscape. My thinking about this work was influenced by the events of 9/11, particularly by the images of individuals and couples falling from the World Trade Towers, as well as by the 1950s Cold War novel and film, On the Beach. Paradise has become an uneasy dwelling place; the sublime sea frames our vulnerability, the precarious nature of life itself."
This series is currently on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago and featured in a major book by the Aperture Foundation.
Misrach, born in 1949, came to prominence through his two-decade series, "Desert Cantos," which characterized the beauty of the desert through its harshness. He studied photography at the University of California, Berkley. Misrach has published several monographs of his work, exhibited in scores of major institutions and has work in over 70 museums.
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Julian Opie, Julian and Suzanne Walking, 2007
animated LED display
Museum purchase with funds provided by
Jan and Howard Hendler
Julian and Suzanne Walking
A new and very exciting sculpture by the renowned artist Julian Opie, has arrived at Phoenix Art Museum, and has been installed in a new and very exciting location. Forty feet above street level on the McDowell façade of the museum is a niche that has been quietly waiting for just the right piece to fill it. The piece portrays two twelve foot tall figures, in white LED lights, a man and a woman walking into the future.
Each of Opie’s works starts from a mundane reality: in this case two people walking. This sculpture portrays the artist and his friend, Suzanne, chosen for her captivating stride, as they continually pass each other. Opie removes his subjects from their setting and takes away their distinctive features – in this case the features which make these two people recognizable. Now these two could be any man and woman walking. They are no longer specific. They become symbols that stand for any couple strolling anywhere, moving forward, out of the past and into the future, part of an endlessly interchangeable series.
Julian Opie’s highly stylised work, derived in part from the reduction of photographs or short films into figurative reproductions which are created using computer software. His work challenges the distinctions between sculpture, painting and the everyday objects of our modern environment. His pared-down, minimal style recalls the economical aesthetic of computer icons or board games. But, although his sculptures retain a flat pictographic quality, they also have a physical presence. With movement, we are given the chance to explore an artificial environment within real time and space.
The artist was born in London. He received his degree from Goldsmith’s College of Art in London, and achieved some early gallery success, thereby having some influence on slightly younger artists attending the same college, including Damien Hirst. One of his earlier works, which brought his style to the public eye, was an album cover he did for one of Britain’s well-known bands. His work has been exhibited at the Tate Britain, and he shows with the top gallery in London. He is the subject of a film profiling contemporary visual artists as well as the subject of a book produced by Tate Publishing as part of their Modern Artist series.
The environments Opie creates suggest urban spaces that include combinations of functional units, with little regard for individuality or the texture of life. In its repetition and anonymity, the work conveys a certain pleasure, a sense of freedom even, that only such neutrality could allow.
Julian Opie has said, “I am always referring to the world, to things that seem poignant to me and then try to synthesize or make my version of these things. Not with individual, specific objects but more as an example of something.”
-- Faith Sussman – Research Docent
Phoenix Art Museum
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ANISH KAPOOR
UPSIDE DOWN/INSIDE OUT, 2003
resin and paint
One of the major conflicts in art has always been centered on the balance to be struck between the necessary visible aspect, the color, space and material employed in the work and the spiritual, invisible level desired and inserted by the artist’s intellect. For Anish Kapoor, the physical reality of his objects is the indispensable beginning of a process, the end point of which connects directly to the world of ideas and the mind. One of the most influential sculptors working today, Anish Kapoor is renowned for his enigmatic sculptural forms that permeate physical and psychological space, often alluding to, and playing with, dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, male-female and body-mind).
Two huge three-dimensional half circles or spheres, facing in opposite directions, flow together into one intense, highly polished, black sculpture which sits directly on the floor. Each half circle has a deep concave space that draws the viewer inward. It is not possible to tell how deep the concave spaces are. Yet within that depth resides the images of the viewers, clear, sharp and upside down. For Kapoor, the material removed to create the concave space is replaced by spectator after spectator, each taking his or her place in the implied infinity of the illusionistic space. His intention is to engage the viewer, evoking mystery through the works’ dark cavities, awe through their size and simple beauty and fascination through their reflective facades.
However, what is also striking about this sculpture is the vivid materiality, high-tech craft and modernist glorification of geometry hidden within. Clearly, a great deal of technical knowledge was necessary to give its concave center the luster necessary to turn it into a mirror, and a special one at that, for the mirrored spectator remains strongly three-dimensional. Kapoor has said that he “wishes to make sculpture…about experience that is outside material concerns,” and he has certainly succeeded.
— Faith Sussman
Museum purchase with funds generously provided by Men’s Arts Council Sculpture Endowment, Susan and Eliot Black, Jacquie and Bennett Dorrance, Ellen and Howard Katz, Sally and Richard Lehmann, Robynn and Robert Sussman, Wilde Family Trust, Heather and Michael Greenbaum, Faith Sussman and Richard Corton, Mary Beth and Joseph Cherskov, Jerry Appell, Denise and Robert Delgado, and Patricia and Richard Nolan.
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