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“Stella’s use of eye-popping colors and commonly available house paint in once-fashionable designer hues formed another bridge between contemporary movements, in this case between the industrial aesthetic of Minimalism and the new color vibrancy of Pop Art… While Warhol’s own colors often range from dazzling to melancholic, Stella’s approach is more like that of a mad color scientist, but with an academic pedigree.”
Michael Auping in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, p. 24
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Frank Stella, New York, 1959
© Hollis Frampton
Frank Stella is one of the leading figures of the Minimalist movement of the 1960s, concentrating his paintings on the relationship between form and color. Minimalist art presents simple, orderly, harmonious, rather purified shapes, reducing its artistic propositions to colour, shape, line and texture. Tetuan I is an archetype of this development of minimalist modern paintings.
In Tetuan I, the yellow and burgundy diagonals are a reflection of the exotic geometric formations and vibrant hues of Arabic tiles. Each of the bright colored paintings from the Moroccan series is further underlined by their geographical titles, which all reference cities in Morocco. Through a closer look, the artist’s brilliant technique is revealed and the small separation between the thinly defined, yellow and burgundy diagonals of fluorescent alkyd pigment come to light. Stella’s use of fluorescent, Day-Glo acrylic paints brings a certain vibrance to his paintings, adding an optical dynamism and illusion of depth to the simplistic geometry of his paintings. Stella’s return to a traditional, square format in his Moroccan paintings underlines the artist’s pioneering investigation of color, placing the focus for the viewer solely upon the potent optical effects of the color combination. Using only a single layer of paint in this series, setting the focal point on the use of fluorescent paint, the artist plays with materiality and physicality, challenging the two-dimensionality of the painting.
Testifying to the significance and rarity of these paintings within the artist’s oeuvre, the majority of the Moroccan paintings are held in such prominent collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, amongst other prestigious international institutions.
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“I do not visualize ideas: I apply a paintbrush, the imprints of the paintbrush become visible, and this may be generative of new ideas.”
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Considering himself as a painter, not an artist, Niele Toroni, born in Switzerland in 1937, is known today as one of the first European minimalist painters of the 1960s. Niele Toroni developed a practice called Travail-Peinture which consisted of marking a surface with imprints of a umber. 50 paintbrush at regular 30 cm intervals.
Toroni’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Kunstmuseum Luzern and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich.
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“My goal is to bring the viewer to the threshold of narrativity without crossing over, to bring the viewer to the state of pure pictorially.”
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Lasker in his New York studio in 2007.
© Intermuseum Conservation Association
Jonathan Lasker incorporates biomorphic shapes, geometric patterns, and graffiti marks within a shared pictorial space. His choice of bold color, his gestural forms and his recurrent use of grid are all part of his distinctive artistic vocabulary. Lasker plays with the visual means of his paintings combining paste-like thick applications of paint with simple line drawings. In his work, opposing elements such as matte and smooth paint, ordered and scribbled forms coexist within the canvas. While his paintings are abstract, the various elements such as the scribbles, the grid and the repetition create a narrative in his paintings. Lasker has generated an alphabet of signs, almost like an unknown script that play with each other in terms of opposition and superimposition. As such Lasker develops a new approach to abstract painting.
