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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The title of Barbara Chase-Riboud's bronze and wool sculpture suggests a self-portrait: the artist's figure is armored and draped in mourning black. This work relies on the artist's observations of textile, metalworking, and casting techniques she encountered in China, India, and Egypt. By combining hard and soft materials with references to her body in her sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s, Chase-Riboud created works that she described as "visually surrealistic." Curator Peter Selz—who organized the 1967 Funk exhibition—commissioned this sculpture, which was featured in Chase-Riboud's first one-person exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Body Ego

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Barbara Chase-Riboud, Confessions for Myself, 1972

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