WITNESS
Witness features new paintings by Southern California-based artist Ruth Pastine. Pastine builds on her previous work to further explore the perceptual experience of color, light, and space created through the relativity of color relationships. Witness series investigates inverse combinations of intense saturated colors and their complementary opposites. The soft edge bands of color create a phenomenological event for the viewer that dematerializes the object into an optical and sensual experience. The experience is heightened by Pastine’s use of custom engineered beveled stretchers, which gives the sensation that the paintings float in front of the wall.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired Witness 5-V9048 (Blue Orange Light), 2016, for their permanent collection and featured it in the exhibition Between Two Worlds: Art of California, in the section entitled Light, Space, and Quality Air along with works by John McCracken, Larry Bell, Norman Zammitt, Don Dudley, James Welling, and Mary Weatherford.
Curated by Gary Garrels, Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, “Between Two Worlds: Art of California is organized thematically in SFMOMA’s newly dedicated California galleries and focuses on works by Bay Area and Los Angeles artists active from the 1960s to now. Some explore the political possibilities of decoration, celebrating styles historically dismissed as ‘feminine’ and unambitious. Others delight in the California landscape, their bold experiments with color, perception, and light catalyzed by its abundant visual pleasures. But all, regardless of topic or form, exist ‘between two worlds,’ a phrase that artist John McCracken used to describe art’s alchemical union of the physical world with the world of imagination. Featured in this presentation are some of the newest additions to our holdings of California art, as well as works that have been in the museum’s collection for decades but have rarely been shown.”
LOCATIONS
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SFMOMA
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Brian Gross Fine Art
248 Utah Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
DATES
Between Two Worlds: Art of California at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:
August 5, 2017 to February 5, 2018
Witness at Brian Gross Fine Art:
January 7 to February 25, 2017
