Looking Back at the 1980s: Gifts to the Collection

Exhibition Website

Sep 3 2016 - Jul 30 2017

Though widely divergent in their concerns and approaches, the artists in this exhibition share an interest in exploring paint as an expressive medium and image making as a layered, experiential endeavor. For all the artists, surface and image coalesce in what David Deutsch described as a “balance of control and accident.” While Fariba Hajamadi’s diptych combines oil paint and photographic emulsion to create a mysterious narrative, Josef Ramaseder’s abstract painting relies on the centering force of a radiating wheel. For both, the images made by heat and light are as important as those made by the artist’s hand.

Similarly, the examples by Christian Eckart and Tony Tasset blur distinctions between both sculpture and painting, and manufactured material and organic matter, as materials like gold leaf and animal fur begin to function as paint. Bill Jones, whose photograph The Sign of the Angels reminds us of the popularity of spirit photography in the late nineteenth-century, and Deutsch, in his untitled landscape, exploit the possibilities inherent in the pairing of detail and blurred image. Seen together, these eight works animate a continuing dialogue about expanding boundaries and artistic innovation in the 1980s.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

  • 20th Century
  • Fariba Hajamadi
  • Tony Tasset
  • Bill Jones
  • and others

Exhibition Venues & Dates