During Abstract Expressionism's heyday in the 1950s, three artists in San Francisco turned away from abstraction and back to representational painting, founding a movement that came to be known as Bay
Area Figuration.
ELMER BISCHOFF is best known as a founder of Bay
Area figuration, along with his close friends and colleagues Richard Diebenkorn and David Park.
Elmer Bischoff: «Figurative Paintings» (closes on Saturday) During the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, a number of painters in San Francisco turned away from abstraction and back to representational painting, thereby founding what came to be known as Bay
Area Figuration.
Famous first as a founding contributor to Bay
Area Figuration of the 1950s and early»60s - a regional counterthrust against the influence of New York School abstraction - Diebenkorn (1922 - 93) has achieved canonical stature internationally for the abstract paintings he began producing after his move to Los Angeles in 1966.
Her works of the late 1950s and early 1960s were created in the manner of Bay
Area Figuration, with heavily applied impasto texturing.
Like the so - called Bay
Area Figuration of Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, Sheehan's pictures discover abstract formal values in views painted from observation.
Paul Wonner, long associated with Bay
Area Figuration, died Wednesday in San Francisco of natural causes on the eve of his 88th birthday.
Her biography, David Park: A Painter's Life (University of California Press, 2012) chronicles the life and art of the founder of Bay
Area Figuration.
Hard - edge painting was only one of them: others included Colour Field, Colour Stain Painting, Op Art, Washington Colour Painting, «One - Image painting», «Systemic painting» (Josef Albers), Lyrical Abstraction, Bay
Area Figuration and Minimal Painting.
Boas's biography, David Park: A Painter's Life (University of California Press, 2012), chronicles the life and art of the founder of Bay
Area Figuration.
«The Lighter Side of Bay
Area Figuration,» Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, 2000.
«The Lighter Side of Bay
Area Figuration,» Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, and San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, 2000.
The Bay Area Figurative Movement (also known as the Bay Area Figurative School, Bay Area Figurative Art, Bay
Area Figuration, and similar variations) was a mid-20th Century art movement made up of a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who abandoned working in the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a return to figuration in painting during the 1950s and onward into the 1960s.
«Her View: The Bay
Area Figuration of Gail Chadell Nanao.»
Instead of the rise and fall of Bay
Area figuration, she gives us a multigenerational view.
Brown experimented freely with a range of styles, and her art has been discussed in relationship to abstract expressionism, Bay
Area figuration, and new image painting.
The succeeding rooms that link Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo and Robert Rauschenberg and survey Bay Area conceptual art under the title of a 1979 SFMOMA show, «Space / Time / Sound,» also put Bay
Area Figuration in its place.
Jones» principal aim here is to demonstrate that Bay
Area figuration constitutes a coherent movement, rather than having been an accumulation of isolated individuals who saw Abstract Expressionism as a moribund, even alien style and who simply began to paint recognizable figures as an antidote.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands The Lighter Side of Bay
Area Figuration.
His pupils transformed it in the 1950s into a local variation called Bay
Area Figuration, featuring freely brushed, color - saturated and impastoed figures.
Were you interested in, let's put it this way, the connection or the origins of Bay
Area figuration, return of the figure out of abstraction?
The museum's major holdings are California - based, highlighting such movements as early and mid-century modernism, Bay
Area Figuration, assemblage, California Light and Space, Pop Art, Minimalism, and installation art.
Bay
Area figuration was characterized by a successful wedding of the figure to an abstract expressionist method of paint handling.
But it remains stuck to their achievements as «Bay
Area Figuration» does to the art of David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn.
Bay
Area figuration was...
Legacy in Continuum: Bay
Area Figuration, on view at the Bakersfield Museum of Art from March 22 through May 27th is an exhibition that demonstrates the continuing impact of a very engaging, flexible style.
Legacy in Continuum: Bay
Area Figuration honors and celebrates a way of thinking about painting that continues to touch a new generation of artists, both in the Bay Area proper and across the Atlantic.
Although it has been argued that these lines resemble some of the geographical features that Diebenkorn observed in the suburban landscape, by the time he painted his Ocean Park paintings he felt he had resolutely abandoned figuration in favor of something much more spiritual and contemplative, as one influential critic noted, «[With the Ocean Parks]... one leaves behind labels like «Abstract Expressionism» and «Bay
Area Figuration» and enters a breathtaking new world that is unique to Diebenkorn as Mondrian's or Still's or Rothko's are to their creators....
Often zigging when the established art world zagged, Wiley began creating large, unctuous paintings inspired by the Abstract Expressionist and Bay
Area Figuration movements of the time, only to swiftly move away from them in the late»60s to develop his cartoonish figurative style, which waned in popularity as Minimalist and Conceptual art became fashionable.
St. John is among the most celebrated artists working in the style of Bay
Area Figuration.
SL: But meantime the Bay Area painters were doing something on their own, forming a so - called figurative, Bay
Area figuration, at this point.
Not exact matches
As the museum notes, his practice melds
figuration, abstraction and decoration and Ofili flexes his muscles in each of these
areas, powerfully incorporating all three in one canvas after another.
The Bay
Area Figurative Movement was an art movement consisted of creators located in the San Francisco Bay
Area who decided to abandon abstract expressionism as a prevailing style and return to
figuration.
In «Two Bathers,» Park's
figuration - which spurred a phalanx of imitators in the Bay
Area - asserts equal claims to picture space on behalf of pure painting and of human reference.
«Fertile Ground» also provides a close look at the pivotal moment when Park led his friends Elmer Bischoff and Diebenkorn from Abstract Expressionism toward a distinctive mode of
figuration, exemplified by Park's «Two Bathers» (1958), still identified with the Bay
Area.
Among the best known is Elmer Bischoff, a talented artist who spent pretty much his whole career in the Bay
Area, alternating between
figuration and abstraction.
La Palestra (2001) by Manuel Neri, equally epitomizes the Bay
Area Figurative Movement's predilection for an approach to
figuration that hinges on non-specificity in representation.
Nathan Oliveira, a leading Bay
Area artist who achieved national prominence fusing Abstract Expressionism and
figuration in psychologically charged canvases that explored human isolation and alienation, died on Nov. 13 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif..
Tags: 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Abstract Expressionism, Abstraction, Ansel Adams, Bay
Area School, Book of the Week, California, Clement Greenberg, Clyfford Still, David Hockney, David Park, East Coast, Elmer Bischoff,
Figuration, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Harold Rosenberg, John Grillo, Leon Kossoff, London School, Lund Humphries, Mark Rothko, Michael Peppiatt, Modern American art, Modern British Art, Richard Diebenkorn, San Francisco, Thomas Williams, Thomas Williams Fine Art, US art, West Coast,
The tide turned when in the late 1950s the «Bay
Area Figurative Movement» began to form in San Francisco from the ranks of the Abstract Expressionists: an increasing number of artists now criticized the non-figurative nature of Abstract Expressionism and revisited
figuration.
Nathan Oliveira, a leading Bay
Area artist who achieved national prominence fusing Abstract Expressionism and
figuration in psychologically charged canvases that explored human isolation and alienation, died on Saturday at his home in Palo Alto, Calif..
Diebenkorn's Bay
Area figurative years from the mid 1950s through the mid 1960s marked a shift from the artist's early abstractions and set him apart from the prevailing movement of the time and many of his contemporaries, for whom the movement of abstraction was thought to be in direct conflict with
figuration.
Opening: «Richard Diebenkorn: Early Color Abstractions 1949 - 1955» at Van Doren Waxter Richard Diebenkorn is one of the most celebrated artists to come out of the Bay
Area Figurative Movement — a group of San Francisco Bay area artists that included David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Wayne Thiebaud — who eventually forsook the dominant Abstract Expressionist style of the»50s to revisit figurat
Area Figurative Movement — a group of San Francisco Bay
area artists that included David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Wayne Thiebaud — who eventually forsook the dominant Abstract Expressionist style of the»50s to revisit figurat
area artists that included David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Wayne Thiebaud — who eventually forsook the dominant Abstract Expressionist style of the»50s to revisit
figuration.
And it is fair to say that the School of London had little to offer the Bay
Area until those artists broke away from abstraction into
figuration, led by David Park in 1950.
Infused with ambiguity, the works operate in the
areas between
figuration and abstraction, history and imagination, past and present.
The evolution from
figuration back to abstraction began shortly after he moved from the San Francisco
area in 1966 to teach at the University of California at Los Angeles.
On his return to the Bay
Area, Diebenkorn renewed his friendships with Park and Bischoff, both of whom had recently given up abstraction for
figuration.
In fact it may be abstraction's strength (and hope)-- while individual «
areas / objects» in an abstract painting may have some limitations over representational objects (how to create an abstract «part» that does not tip the painting into
figuration), abstraction has the advantages of not being limited by subjects and a certain type of visual space.
The boundary between abstract and
figuration, is impossible to draw as there is not actually a division, just a blurred
area.
2 Brought to bear on our eye by subtle colour gradations of mauve, grey, blue or brown, his colour field becomes charged through a strategic introduction of condensed
areas of darker or lighter hue, bringing the work closer to Klee's ideal of «exactitude winged by intuition».3 Despite the artist's quest for total abstraction, all Gaitonde's seemingly non-objective works have elements of unevenness and suggestion, which tend toward
figuration.