TWENTY FIVE YEARS SUMMER 2019 PETER BLAKE GALLERY | 435 OCEAN AVENUE LAGUNA BEACH CA 92647 | PETERBLAKEGALLERY.COM | (949) 376-9994 | “Light carries information” – Lita Albuquerque LITA ALBUQUERQUE Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque (born 1946, Santa Monica, CA) has created an expansive body of work, ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting and multi-media performance to ambitious site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. Often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, Albuquerque has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary using the earth, color, the body, motion, and time to illuminate identity as part of the universal. She represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale, where she was awarded the Biennale’s top prize. Albuquerque has also been the recipient of the National Science Foundation Artist Grant Program for the artwork, Stellar Axis: Antarctica, which culminated in the first and largest ephemeral artwork created on that continent, three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA, among others. She is on the core faculty of the Fine Art Graduate Program at Art Center College of Design and currently lives and works in Santa Monica, California. PETER BLAKE GALLERY LITA ALBUQUERQUE UNTITLED 2018 24K Gold Leaf on Resin, Pigment on Panel 42 x 42 x 4 inches $42,000 PETER BLAKE GALLERY Peter Alexander (b. 1939, Los Angeles) came to PETER ALEXANDER prominence during the Light and Space movement with a series of sculptures made of cast resin and colored pigment. A reflection of his early training in architecture, his work takes on forms ranging from cubes and pyramids to drips and bars, exploring the perceptual qualities of light, color, and optics. To achieve these effects materially, the artist developed a process to retain the liquid-like appearance of urethane during its solidification. Often situated between the West Coast artists focused on perceptual phenomena and the New York Minimalists of the 1960s, Alexander’s works retain their material objectivity while harnessing the immateriality of light through a combination of refraction and emanation. In 1980, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His first full-scale retrospective, In This Light, was organized by The Orange County Museum of Art in 1999. Work by Alexander is held in the permanent collections of the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. PETER BLAKE GALLERY PETER ALEXANDER 1/10/14 2014 Urethane 80.5 x 6.5 x 3.25 inches $150,000 PETER BLAKE GALLERY Larry Bell is most commonly known for his Minimalist LARRY BELL sculptures—transparent cubes that thrive on the interplay of shape, light, and environment— that champion the ideas of the Light and Space Movement of the 1960s. Although Bell had early success with Abstract Expressionist painting, a side job at a frame shop led him to experiment with excess scraps of glass, thus beginning his fascination with the material’s interaction with light. Bell’s first series of cubes combined three-dimensional glass forms with transmitted light, creating illusions of perspective through angles, ellipses, and mirrors. His later purchase of industrial plating equipment allowed him to create sculptures with metallic-coated glass and, eventually, drawings on mylar-coated paper. At age 46, correction of a lifelong hearing disability brought depressive hallucinations, which Bell channeled into collages of coated materials for catharsis. PETER BLAKE GALLERY LARRY BELL SMBKWDEN #6 c. 1993 Glass with Mirror Back, Black Matte Frame 30 x 30 x 5 inches $95,000 PETER BLAKE GALLERY A flamboyant character and a key figure in the Ferus BILLY AL BENGSTON Gallery circle in Los Angeles, Billy Al Bengston is associated with West Coast Pop and best known for spray painting dented sheets of square aluminum with lacquer. These highly finished pieces often featured car and motorcycle motifs, such as the chevron symbol placed at the center of his works, and many include Bengston’s signature sergeant’s stripes, or abstracted images of hearts. His interest in car culture would inspire Judy Chicago, a student of Bengston’s, to attend auto body school and eventually use spray paint techniques. PETER BLAKE GALLERY BILLY AL BENGSTON MESQUITE WESTERN SERIES 1969 Lacquer and Polyester Resin on Aluminum 23 x 22 inches NFS PETER BLAKE GALLERY Ron Cooper is among the pioneering California- RON COOPER based Light and Space artists, so-called because they broke beyond the bounds of the physical object to experiment with the manipulation of light and space and their effects on perception. Cooper works with variously colored fluorescent lights, as well as materials like glass panels, resin, and fiberglass that hold, refract, and reflect light. Though his vocabulary is Minimalist—he crafts cubes, rectangles, and circles out of the interplay of light on the materials he uses— his works are luminous, insubstantial, devoid of mass and solidity. PETER BLAKE GALLERY RON COOPER UNTITLED VERTICAL 1968 Acrylic Lacquer, Nacreous Pigment on Plexiglass 84 x 3.5 x 3.5 inches NFS PETER BLAKE GALLERY Best known for her exploration of radiant and MARY CORSE interactive surfaces and her innovative technique of painting, Mary Corse first gained recognition for her involvement in the Light and Space movement in 1960s Southern California, along with James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Douglas Wheeler. Like many of these artists, Corse rejected Abstract Expressionist practices of using accident and relinquishing intention in the application of pigment, favoring instead the controlled formal geometry of Minimalism. As the viewer moves or surrounding light conditions alter, Corse’s works seem to shift subtly, creating a complex spatial and temporal dynamic. As the artist herself eloquently said, “Where there is space, there is time.” PETER BLAKE GALLERY MARY CORSE UNTITLED (WHITE MULTI INNER BANDS, FLAT SIDES, BEVELED CANVAS) 2011 Glass Microspheres in Acrylic on Canvas 96 x 96 inches $625,000 PETER BLAKE GALLERY DeLap and John Coplans were founding faculty TONY DELAP members in the 1965 opening of the University of California at Irvine, where Tony taught in the Art Department until 1991. DeLap served as the project consultant for “Best Kept Secret, UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 1964-1971” for the Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time: Art In LA 1945-1980,” held at the Laguna Art Museum. As a pioneer artist of Abstractionism, Minimalism and Op Art on the West Coast, Tony participated in both the 1965 Responsive Eye at MOMA and the 1966 Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum. He has had retrospectives at the Oceanside Museum of Art in 2013, the Orange County Museum of Art in 2000, and the San Jose Museum of Art in 2001. Major museum collections include the New York Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim museum, the Tate Gallery in London, the LA County Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Art Galley in Buffalo, New York, and the Le Musee cantonal des beaux-arts in Lausanne, Switzerland. PETER BLAKE GALLERY TONY DELAP PERPLEXITY 1988 Oil on Canvas on Wood 74 x 38.5 x 4.25 inches $95,000 PETER BLAKE GALLERY A central figure in the California Light and Space LADDIE JOHN DILL movement, Laddie John Dill has been crafting light and earthy materials like concrete, glass, sand, and metal into luminous sculptures, wall pieces, and installations since the 1970s. Referring to his choice of materials, Dill explains: “I was influenced by [Robert] Rauschenberg, Keith Sonnier, Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Irwin, who were working with earth materials, light, and space as an alternative to easel painting.” Among his most celebrated works is an untitled installation from 1971, for which Dill filled a gallery with mounds of pale sand, topped with precisely arranged glass panels illuminated by the soft, green glow of argon lighting set just beneath the surface. When he does use canvas, he paints with pigments derived from cement and natural oxides. PETER BLAKE GALLERY LADDIE JOHN DILL UNTITLED 1969 Tempered 1/4” Plate Glass, Kiln Dried Redwood, Natural Colored Cement, Stainless Steel, Argon Tubing with Mercury Transformer 100 x 6.5 x 6.5 inches $40,000 PETER BLAKE GALLERY Joe Goode was born in Oklahoma City, OK in 1937. JOE GOODE In 1959, he moved to Los Angeles, CA, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute until 1961. First recognized for his “Pop Art” milk bottle paintings and cloud imagery, Goode’s work was included along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the 1962 historically important and ground-breaking exhibition New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum). This historical exhibition was the first “Pop Art” museum exhibition in the United States. Through the years, Joe Goode has combined various traditional and non-traditional media in the creation of his artwork. He has explored images which project a way of seeing “in and out” and “up and down” as well as things that can be seen through: milk bottles, oceans, waterfalls, clouds and torn skies. While his subject matter has remained relatively consistent over the years, he has revisited each theme using different media, aiding him in finding unique ways in which he continues to work.