AGNES PELTON

Agnes Pelton left Long Island for a new life in the Southern California desert. The sea change of the title is both a personal and a cultural one, as she felt the visual world moving into heady, metaphysical directions. The work is oblique, its abstract forms are shapely and organic, conjuring up the ebb and flow of water and the curvature of the female form in equal measure. It is unplaceable, framed by architectural details that open onto neither sea nor land but instead a consciousness. Pelton saw the movement of thought in the movement of the tides, of nature, that lapped and retreated in quiet crescendoes before crashing into realisation. Art, she thought, channeled the universal energies around us through color and light, able to be perceived as active being which vibrate like, Pelton said, “the fragrance of a flower [which] fills the consciousness with the essence of its life.” 

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

In 1920, Piet Mondrian reached his artistic maturity with a style that would redefine the very meaning of art. Thin black lines separating rectangular forms, predominantly white but with scarce bursts of primary colours. It was the realisation of Mondrain’s vision for “pure abstract art… completely emancipated, free of naturalistic appearances’, and was, for many, the pinnacle of abstraction. Yet, 40 odd years later, the American pop artist  Roy Lichtenstein paints a Mondrian and, while he changes almost nothing, completely redefines the very nature of abstraction. Lichtenstein’s paints a Mondrian because Mondrian’s signature style was so defined, had such a unique and clear language, that it was able to be generically reproduced. And all that Lichtenstein changes is the addition of two panels of Ben-Day dots as a stand in for solid colour. He abstracts that which is reduced to its most simple, turns a solid block into repetitive disks, removing Mondrian’s artistic conclusion even further away from the naturalistic appearance it was escaping. For all that, the piece works on another, more disquieting level. By co-opting and adapting a style of total abstraction, Lichtenstein undoes the very goal it set out to seek. The piece is no longer abstract, instead it is a representational, photo-realist recreation of an object. The work has been retained, it’s visual success has made it a style, and so it has lost its freedom for it represents above all itself.

MAN RAY

For an exhibition in 1917, Man Ray made a series of ten collages that he framed and installed  on a rotating pole, moveable by the audience, and called ‘Revolving Doors’. The works are geometric abstractions, bright and playful in nature they combine machine like, rigid forms with a loose human touch that brings a musicality to their composition. The works were not well received on their debut, too colourful for those collectors used to the muted palettes of Cubism and lyrical, serious abstraction. The original collages and their revolving stand were destroyed but years later, Ray reproduced the works as a series of prints, such as the one here. Viewed together, they tell a cohesive story of movement and a hopeful modernity but alone, we are able to focus on the formal components. The work is proto-color theory, a study in shades and their interactions, but it also touches on the same themes that Ray returned to throughout his career, a visual depiction of music. The sensual shape of instruments are reduced into geometric purity and the work can almost be heard through the interplay of shape and color.