Posts Tagged ‘Craig Kauffman artwork’
Hemispheres and Hexagons
Acrylic lacquer on vacuum formed plastic
34 x 38 x 12 in
Drape formed acrylic with acrylic lacquer and glitter
36 x 40 x 8 in.
Kauffman’s late work was presented in a solo show at Danese Gallery, New York, in 2011. Among the strong reviews was a highly descriptive and praising analysis by Ken Johnson in the New York Times:
“In the late 1960s Mr. Kauffman…formed shapes resembling large hemispherical bubbles, which attracted much attention at the time. Recently he returned to the bubble form, and this show presents a half-dozen examples. Painted from behind in nacreous lacquers–in off-whites and tints of orange, yellow and green–they resemble giant pearls. He also created concave forms with glittery, six-sided centers that are like big flower blossoms. Also spray-painted from behind, they are exquisitely colored. Glowing misty yellow surrounds the magenta center of one; royal blue frames the emerald hexagon of another.”
–excerpt from Johnson, Ken. “Art in Review: Craig Kauffman, ‘Late Work.'” New York Times, October 1, 2010
Playful Erotic Themes
Critics and curators have often noted the erotic qualities of Craig Kauffman’s pneumatic forms. Christopher Knight, when reviewing the large survey show in 1981, identified the art historical sources: “The traditions from which Kauffman’s art springs are many, but two are paramount: the erotic, mechanomorphic imagery of Francis Picabia, and especially, Marcel Duchamp…”
Then, in1965 the critic William Wilson tagged the early 1965 vacuum-formed plastic works as “…that curious form, variously described as an erotic thermometer or a phallus designed in a wind tunnel…”, thus coining a couple of names often repeated by others.
Much later, in 2001 Kauffman continued with his playful erotic themes, inventing forms that can alternately be seen as voluminous and suggestive. The “Donuts,” as shown above, were created inside a wooden form, and sucked down into their shape by a thermoplastic process known as vacuum forming. They were painted on the interior of the form with glowing color.
In a 2017 show at the Hall Art Foundation, artist Eric Fischl illustrated “the extremes associated with romantic and sexual love.” Fischl chose to include one of Kauffman’s works in the show, along with dozens of paintings and sculpture from the Hall Art Foundation. As noted in the exhibition statement, “the extremes associated with eros can also be perceived in the sculpted form.”
Exhibition curated by Eric Fischl for the Hall Art Foundation in Reading, Vermont. May 6, 2017 – November 26, 2017
Illustrated above from the Hall Art Foundation collection:
Untitled, 2001
Acrylic lacquer on vacuum formed plastic
32 x 35 ½ x 5 ½ inches
Tell Tale Heart
Kauffman used unusual biomorphic forms in his 1958 paintings exhibited at Ferus. The shapes were painted in primary colors, on a white background. Later, in a 1976 interview with Michael Auping for the UCLA Oral History project , Kauffman was asked, “Where do those shapes come from?”
Kauffman replied: “A lot of different sources. They come from some sort of dada influence, things that are around my apartment, and things I was interested in: kind of sexual, biomorphic mixture with mechanical things. Funny combinations of influences: I mean, Mondrian and Duchamp and dada and biomorphism and abstract expressionism all at once. But I really just sort of wanted to really have things really sparse looking. I sort of really did them out of instinct, but they look OK to me now. As I say, that’s where I really took off from.”
–Quote from Auping, Michael. Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait. Craig Kauffman Interviewed by Michael Auping. Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1976-1977, p. 21
Illustrated above:
Tell Tale Heart, 1958
Oil on linen
68 ½ x 49 inches
Norton Simon Museum collection
Beyond Brancusi: The Space of Sculpture was ashow at the Norton Simon Museum in 2014. The curatorial perspective centered on the influence of Constantin Brancusi on generations of 20th century sculptors. Craig Kauffman’s 1969 work was from the permanent collection of the museum, acquired by the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1970.
The works by Californians on display at the NSM explored the qualities of light, color, reflection, and translucency. They play with our perception of sculptural space, complicating the subject/object relationship as they dissolve into the surrounding environment. Spatial relationships and perceptual phenomena are the primary focus of these works.
The third room of the exhibit featured “a grouping of works by Southern California artists who introduced experimental materials and expanded the relationship between sculptural object and space even further.” This space contained works by five artists: Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Helen Pashgian, and DeWain Valentine. A large forty inch cube by Larry Bell rested just beyond the doorway.
Craig Kauffman
Untitled, 1969
Acrylic lacquer on plastic
73 x 50 x 9 inches
Copyright Estate of Craig Kauffman/Artists Rights Society ARS/NY
News for Craig Kauffman
On Plexiglass at MoMA
Installed by Starr Figura, curator of Drawings and Prints, On Plexiglass is now on view on the 4th floor, in the David Geffen Galleries. The scholarly context and wide range of artists brilliantly shows the history and use of the material. As the MoMA demonstrates, acrylic plastic was invented in the early 1930s, and was widely used due to the properties of being lightweight, stable, transparent and malleable. Other artists from the MoMA collection include Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy, Claes Oldenburg, Bridget Riley, Robert Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman, Jesus Rafael Soto and more. Kauffman’s Red-Blue work was acquired in 1965.
Light, Space, Surface: Works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The first venue for this traveling exhibit is the Addison Gallery, Phillips Academy Andover, from November 23, 2021 to March 20, 2022. Organized by LACMA, this exhibition explores the art of Light and Space as well as related works. In the 1960s and 1970s, various Southern California artists began to create works that investigate perceptual phenomena: how we come to understand form, volume, presence, and absence through light, seen directly through other materials, reflected, or refracted. Many used industrial materials—including sheet acrylic, fiberglass, and polyester resin—in their work. Light, Space, Surface draws on LACMA’s deep holdings of this material. Featured artists include Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Judy Chicago, Mary Corse, Fred Eversley, Robert Irwin, John McCracken, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler.
The De Luxe Show
Craig Kauffman’s work was recently included in a re-creation of an important 1971 racially integrated exhibition at Parker Gallery in Los Angeles and Karma Gallery in New York. Kauffman was represented at Parker Gallery by a 1968 Untitled bubble, now in the collection of the Orange County Museum of Art. Originally presented in an abandoned movie theater located in a Black area of Houston, The De Luxe Show was one of the first racially integrated shows in the United States. The organizers brought major art to an underserved neighborhood, allowing residents to see work that was not available in their familiar surroundings. Featuring emerging and established abstract modern painters and sculptors of the time, the exhibition was curated by Peter Bradley with the backing of collectors and philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil.
Current online show of prints at FLG
Our current online exhibition concentrates on a series of lithographs by Craig Kauffman, completed at Cirrus Editions in 1980-81. Kauffman worked directly with Cirrus founder, the master printer Jean Milant. As author Hunter Drohojowska-Philp observed, “In 1980, Kauffman transferred his excitement over his collaged silk paints to prints. For the paintings, he drew a black ink line around each white paper strip that he cut out and glued to the silk surface. But to emulate the effect in lithography was far more complicated. The rest of the print was created using a brush and washes of color. These prints are close approximations of the paintings made around the same time — the interior of a room with a vase of flowers, or a pear on a table, or two faces in profile looking at one another. They are highly abstract, however, and the images are not easily deciphered.”
Always a painter
Like so many of the artists who came into prominence during the 1960s, Craig Kauffman began as a painter, and consistently identified as one. His friends in New York, such as artists Robert Morris and Donald Judd, also had been painters in their early careers. And his colleagues in L. A., such as Larry Bell and Robert Irwin, were painters before they transitioned to their work with perception, environments, and site-determined works.
In a 1969 interview with Alan Solomon, transcribed by Matthew Simms for the Archives of American Art, Kauffman confirmed this by saying, “I don’t think of myself as a sculptor and I don’t even think Larry thinks of himself as a sculptor, and we’ve been classified as that lots of times, and you know when I think of myself I don’t really like those terms and I don’t think Bob does either.”
Untitled, 1968
Acrylic lacquer on vacuum formed plastic
22 1/4 x 52 1/4 inches
Le mur s’en va, 1969
Acrylic lacquer on plastic
73 x 48 x 8 1/2 inches
Collection of Art Institute of Chicago
Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago © Estate of Craig Kauffman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1966 Wall Reliefs
Craig Kauffman was very much aware of developments in mainstream modern art of the 1960s. The intersection of painting and sculpture was producing a kind of hybrid art that, by 1965, became known by several critical terms (Primary Structures, ABC art, Literalist art, reductive abstraction, and eventually, Minimalism.) This was an art produced by industrial processes, without evidence of the artist’s hand or a sense of school or style. Artists abandoned traditional media and used new materials, to support their aesthetic and philosophical or perceptual investigations. For Kauffman’s wall relief paintings, the choice of material was obvious, as he had already been using sheets of industrial material, acrylic plastic.
In his “Washboards” from 1966, Kauffman also addressed some of the issues which were important to the more theoretical Minimalist art: serial artworks, industrial multiples, and anonymity. But where the New Yorkers’ materials were hard and cold—steel, lead and wood—Kauffman’s supple plastic was colored and full of curves. John Coplans had noted that Kauffman’s use of plastic was much more organic than the materials of his colleagues Larry Bell and Donald Judd, because he was able to curve the material by a thermoplastic process known as vacuum forming. Coplans wrote that, “the very nature of the process enhances the sensuousness of the material: it is transformed from a hard, flat crystalline sheet into a sinuously curvilinear profile.”
Illustrated:
Craig Kauffman, Untitled, 1966
acrylic on vacuum formed colored plastic,
55 1⁄2 x 31 x 6 inches
Photo by Brian Forrest, courtesy of Kayne Griffin Corcoran
Copyright Estate of Craig Kauffman/Artists Rights Society, ARS New York
Craig Kauffman’s Color
By 1971, Kauffman continued his interests in process art and forming plastic, but changed the way that the paint was applied, sometimes in a loose, uneven manner. Applied from the back, the color combination of green, yellow and red is reminiscent of the color of French painters like Matisse used after their travels. Kauffman stated, “I love colors in Mexico and Mexican buildings and all that stuff…and it mostly exists in my mind. I have never been to Mexico City. I have just been to Tijuana and Baja.” But Kauffman was also very much aware of how painters like Matisse were influenced, in a similar way, by the colors they saw in North Africa.
In an interview with Michael Auping, Kauffman recalled, “Well, I moved back out here [Laguna Beach] and then I went into forming those pieces that were only seen in Paris: some bars, and there were some that are like boards. They’re actually done over boards, put on sort of like the boards on a house around here…some of them were sprayed in sort of this uneven way. Then others were poured into this channel from the back.”
Illustrated:
Craig Kauffman Untitled, 1971
acrylic lacquer on press formed plastic
48 x 96 x 2 inches
Photography courtesy Sprüth Magers
Photo by Timo Ohler, copyright Estate of Craig Kauffman/Artists Rights Society ARS New York
Quotations from:
Auping, Michael. Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait. Craig Kauffman Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1976.
Robert Morris and Craig Kauffman
Craig Kauffman and Robert Morris had a long friendship, dating back to April of 1958 when they both exhibited at the Dilexi Gallery, Opening Group Show, in the North Beach section of San Francisco. The two artists met up again several times, especially in New York during the late 1960s.
Their frequent discussions resulted in a short-lived collaboration for the exhibition Using Walls (Indoors) at the Jewish Museum in 1970, which remained open for only one day, and which Kauffman described as a combination of both of the artists’ ideas. Only a few years prior, Morris begun making process-oriented felt pieces, in which he hung strips of industrial felt on the wall and allowed gravity to determine their shape. This influenced Kauffman’s conception of his series of Loops, in which sheets of spray-painted Plexiglas seem to casually droop over a wire.
In Kauffman’s work, the environment constantly shifts as the viewer moves around each object. The light that moves across the curved edges of each piece facilitates the full comprehension of their forms. This draws comparisons to Morris’s own textual formulations in his influential Notes on Sculpture series, which advocated a phenomenological reading of the art object, how they change under varying conditions of light and space. The colored shadows of the hanging Loops and the cast plastic forms that project into space directly implicate both the viewer and their supports.
The photos above show the installation on the first floor of the exhibition curated by Frank Lloyd, Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris, Sprüth Magers London, January 19—March 31, 2018.
Installation views: Sprüth Magers, London, Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris, January 19–March 31, 2018.
Photo Courtesy Sprüth Magers
Photography by Stephen White
Craig Kauffman and Donald Judd
Craig Kauffman and Donald Judd met in the mid-1960s, when both had studios in Manhattan. They were friends and exchanged works, with Judd acquiring a 1967 translucent orange Plexiglas wall relief by Kauffman. Over the last 50 years, curators and critics have often noted the similarities in their use of industrial materials, serial imagery, with hybrid objects that present the relationship of sculpture and the wall.
Donald Judd used the phrase “specific objects” to describe his own work, a format which operated between painting and sculpture. Like the work of Judd, Kauffman’s three-dimensional plastic paintings occupy this liminal category. Their volume suggests that they are sculpture, but their presence on the wall reinforces their status as paintings. The unity of color and form, achieved through the use of industrial materials, is a point of similarity between the two artists’ objectives.
In the 2018 Sprüth Magers exhibit Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris, Donald Judd’s work was contextualized by the inclusion of the stack piece Untitled (Bernstein 80-4) (1980) and the floor piece Untitled, DSS 234 (1970). In the same ground floor room, curator Frank Lloyd placed the 1967 Craig Kauffman, which Judd had owned, along with a 1969 Kauffman Untitled Wall relief. Writing for Flash Art, critic Alex Bennet noted:
“Kauffman’s work on show demonstrates an unchallenged desire for phenomenological observation, a project of formal pleasure that distends from concerns of figure and ground, wall and support, industrial procedure and material contingency. The ground floor features Kauffman’s bulging biomorphic and bullishly lusty vacuum forms, shellacked and uniform like candies in chronic tangerine or extravagant duotone: ridged carnation pink protruding from a lacquered jade. Each one has its own resolute charm.”
Installation view: Sprüth Magers, London, Crossroads: Kauffman, Judd and Morris, January 19–March 31, 2018.
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