dayoutlast is a record of my direct engagement with mostly contemporary art, mostly Los Angelean.

As this blog has evolved since its 2010 inception, so has my perspective. What I once perceived as central within the investigation was what was central, literally, within the photographic frame that I shared here. While still an important consideration, such thinking has also given way to more peripheral considerations, ones also accompanied occasionally by text (written manifestation of thought) and the oscillations between them. What's missing here are larger unknowns surrounding issues of presentation and representation; the amount of time and space it actually takes to accomplish such first-hand observations; and the quandaries between documentation and interpretation.

Despite my attempt to communicate here with image and text what is essential in some respect about the artwork, neither representation should ever be considered a substitution for the primary viewing experience. Of course, occasionally there are exceptions.

Most of the time, these posts are merely remnants---residual fragments---from my last day out.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Maria Lassnig @ Hauser Wirth & Schimmel


Violette Form (Purple Form), 1951
Oil on canvas



Flächenteilung Schwarz-Grau 9 (Field-division black-grey 8), 1953
Oil on cardboard



Flächenteilung Schwarz-Weiss-Grau 2 (Field-division black-white-grey 2), 1953
Oil on cardboard



Flächenteilung Schwarz-Weiss-Grau 1 (Field-division black-white-grey 1), 1953
Oil on cardboard



detail from Dornenreif/Frau im Dornenreifen, 1963/1964
Oil on canvas



detail from Der Indianer in Berlin (The Native American in Berlin), 1979
Oil on canvas


Unterbrechung (Interruption), 1989
Oil on canvas


Selbstporträt mit Sprechblase (Self-portrait with speech bubble), 2006
Oil on canvas



Having come to know Lassnig's work a bit within the past ten years or so, it was a nice surprise to see these earlier works, the ones from the 50's where her investigation of pictorial space seemed to precede the likes of Ellsworth Kelly, for example. Kelly's negotiation of organic and geometric space came to mind instantly with Purple Form.  So, Lassnig, too, was preoccupied with how color occupies space and what contains it.  That said, I believe it is the psychology of her figurative work that brought her attention, and so, again, it was interesting to make this connection between earlier structurally-based works, let's call them, and later works that fuse the body to such concerns.  The space a body occupies continues to be amorphous in Lassnig's paintings. In fact, the space a body IS also seems slightly ambiguous, amoebic, a fluid, a spill barely contained, and somehow the color juxtapositions hold things place.



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