With great anticipation, we await the arrival of this new tome from the University of California Press.
Roy De Forest’s brightly hued,
crazy-quilted paintings and sculptures are dotted with nipples of color and
inhabited by a cast of characters uniquely his own, a perennial favorite being
his instantly recognizable, wild-eyed and pointy-eared dogs.
Published in
conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of the American painter’s
fifty-year career, Of Dogs and Other People reassesses De Forest’s
art-historical position, placing him in a national rather than solely West
Coast context.
Despite the playfulness of his
work, close study of De Forest’s art reveals deep layers of meaning. He was a fan
of adventure stories, pulp fiction, and underground commix, but he also
commanded a vast knowledge of art history and read widely in a variety of
disciplines, including poetry, literature, philosophy, psychology, science, and
mathematics.
He enjoyed secreting obscure art-historical references into his
work: animals assume postures found in Medieval or Renaissance art, and his
compositional strategies draw from sources ranging from the romantic landscape
painters of the Hudson River School to the austere geometric abstractions of
Piet Mondrian.
This engaging publication presents
gorgeous color reproductions of De Forest’s finest artworks, plus a variety of
figure illustrations that illuminate the artist’s diverse sources and
freewheeling social and creative milieu in Northern California.
The book is authored by Susan Landauer, and published in association with the
Oakland Museum of California. Bay Crossings will carry a full review in the coming months.
Meanwhile, be sure to bookmark the exhibition dates:
Oakland Museum of California:
April 29–August 20, 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment