The Santa Monica College Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery will present an exhibition of the work of five prominent Los Angeles abstract painters – Edith Baumann, James Hayward, Scot Heywood, John Miller, and Ed Moses – starting Oct. 25.
“Marks and Movement: Five Painters” displays the works of a group of painters who have known each other for more than 30 years.
This exhibit presents an influential generation of Southern California abstract painters whose work captures the timelessness and inventiveness of pure abstraction.
The show runs Oct. 25 through Dec. 3, with the opening reception from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22.
The gallery is located in the SMC Performing Arts Center on Santa Monica Boulevard at 11th Street.
“In Southern California, the long unbroken tradition of abstract painting is one of the region’s most important contributions to art history,” said Frances Colpitt in her essay, “Marks and Movement: Development of Los Angeles Abstraction.”
“Representing not only abstraction’s longevity, the paintings in ‘Marks and Movements’ testify to the viability of this form of expression for the 21st century.”
Colpitt says that Moses “is not only the elder statesman but has been influential to some extent on each of his colleagues.”
Miller, in contrast to Moses’ experimental processes, “has fiercely hewn to an allover format of small bars set at angles to the framing edge of a raw canvas field.”
Baumann, Colpitt notes, shares Miller’s formal concerns and is especially sensitive to the reflection of light from the surface.
For the first time in this exhibition, Hayward’s watershed painting “Four Birds” (1980-81) is being included. “Following the development of what became a ‘signature style’ for the young artist from 1975 to 1980 – the smooth, taut monochromatic surface of his Automatic Paintings – ‘Four Birds’ looks to the future as well as the past,” the essay says.
And finally, Heywood stresses the essential flatness of painting, activating the surface of his canvases with matte medium and paint in a subtler crosshatch pattern.
Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.
For more information, call 310.434.3434.
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