Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Through Jan 19

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The works on view here are composed of forms and materials that evoke the sensual feelings of having and exploring a body of flesh and bones—from the erotic to the anxious. Many of the artists were featured in two 1967 exhibitions: Eccentric Abstraction in New York and Funk in Berkeley, California. Eccentric Abstraction, curated by Lucy Lippard, presented artists, including Bruce Nauman, Don Potts, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse, whose work was rigorously abstract yet retained a sensuous quality. The artists whose work was shown by the curator Peter Selz in Funk, among them Jeremy Anderson, Ken Price, and Franklin Williams, were more explicit in their references to guts, fingers, and anthropomorphic forms. The objects the Funk artists produced may seem innocuous at first glance, but the subtle protrusions and openings of works such as Ken Price’s S. L. Green (1963) or Franklin Williams’s Untitled (1966) evoke both the anxieties and the ecstasies of our physical being. Looking beyond these historic exhibitions, this gallery brings together artists from across the country who worked with unorthodox materials to create objects of embodied abstraction.

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Abstract painting with bold red, gray, and blue areas, splashes of color, and a small grid of black shapes.

Combining painting with collage at a large scale, Raymond Saunders's imagery exists between abstraction and figuration. Here the artist transformed the central figure in Emmanual Leutze's monumental history painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), surrounding the loosely rendered and ghostly likeness in bright red and pooling greys and browns. Saunders makes reference to the obscured soldiers by affixing a postcard depicting toy soldiers. Working in Northern California for many years, Saunders developed a collage-based painting mode that alluded to racial and social issues while maintaining a dreamy, elegiac atmosphere.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Body Ego

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Raymond Saunders, Untitled, 1968

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