Tracing the Edge - Benton Museum of Art Pomona College
Tracing the Edge
On View August 23, 2023 – January 7, 2024
The Hard-Edge style was one of the first widely recognized art movements to originate in our region, coming at a time when Los Angeles was considered a cultural backwater. Often contrasted to the loaded gestures of Abstract Expressionism, Hard-Edge came to represent a distinctly West Coast approach to modernist abstraction that emphasized a cool, detached, and formal contemplation of vision and aesthetics.
Los Angeles is no longer just the edge of the art world, but it continues to nurture painters finding new languages of abstraction. This exhibition brings together leading historical Hard-Edge painters with four contemporary artists based in Southern California whose works expand our notions of what abstraction can be and mean. Often drawing on visual traditions outside of European modernism, Jackie Amézquita, Linda Arreola, Aryana Minai, and Kristopher Raos use shape, texture, color, and material to engage questions of class, spirituality, memory, and politics. In contrast to Hard-Edge’s reputation as formal and removed, these contemporary works draw close to the world, jumbling and reorganizing the boundaries among tastes, places, times, and states of mind.
Accompanying the Benton’s survey of the work of Hard-Edge painter June Harwood, this exhibition contextualizes her work within a regional tradition of abstraction that has remained consistent through LA’s history.
Signals - University of Laverne
Signals
February 6-March 21, 2024
Signals is a group exhibition featuring paintings by Nick Aguayo, Greg Ito, Dion Johnson, Helen Lundeberg, Christine Nguyen, Annabel Osberg, and Kristopher Raos. Executed with rigor, grace, and a personal touch, the works included in this show may allude to signs, symbols, or dreams. Signals presents paintings of different shapes and sizes that range from figurative representation to color-focused abstraction, graphic precision to expressive gesture, up-beat tempo to calm meditation, and impressive scale to nuanced detail.
In Nick Aguayo’s painting, In the name of all the other participants, the interlocking shapes with colorful edges feel like a sonic puzzle – a visual geometry amplified by an arpeggiating energy. The parallelogram and triangle shaped canvases by Kristopher Raos have an auditory ingredient. Within Raos’s rich color fields, the onomatopoeic word “Boing” appears compositionally cropped and stylized like a comic book or advertising font. The hardedge abstraction of Helen Lundeberg and Dion Johnson is striking and crisp. Lundeberg’s color planes carefully align and create a dynamic exterior view and a mysterious interior space, while Johnson’s intricately layered canvas, which is influenced by Lundeberg’s work, alludes more to sensations and atmospheres. Also employing precision and clean edges, Greg Ito’s circular canvas, Time Flies, presents a fantastic journey with personal symbols. Drifting off into dreamland, Annabel Osberg and Christine Nguyen paint imaginary scenarios. Osberg’s imagery seems to honor spirits and conjure ghosts, and her narratives may reflect on the body’s relationship to a changing environment. The grand scale of Nguyen’s color field abstraction with silhouetted birds and flora simultaneously ascends up toward the ceiling and stretches onto the floor, welcoming viewers to take a closer look.
Signals emphasizes that art is participatory. Each piece transmits layers of meaning from its painted surface to the viewers’ optic receptors – these messages and sensations become part of a lively a visual conversation where gallery visitors are invited to look, interact, and discover.
