DARK ILLUMINATION
Peter Alexander, Edith Baumann, Tony DeLap, Joe Goode, Marcia Hafif, Dennis Hopper, Mike Kelley, John McCracken, Bruce Nauman, Ken Price, and Ed Ruscha.
March 20 - April 25, 2025
These frozen minutes, as sunshine turns into darkness, already raise the perennial question about L.A.: utopia or dystopia? Sunshine or Noir?
-Lars Nittve, "Sunshine & Noir: Art in Los Angeles 1960–1997"
Peter Alexander
Untitled (Wedge), 1968
cast polyester resin
18½ x 9¾ x 9 in | 46.9 x 24.7 x 22.8 cm
Edith Baumann
Untitled #4, 1979
acrylic on canvas
36 x 46¾ in | 91.4 x 118.7 cm
Tony DeLap
The Card Sharp, 2004
acrylic on linen
30 3/4 x 31 x 3 3/8 in | 78 x 78.7 x 8.5 cm
Joe Goode
Smokey The Bear, 1963
oil and graphite on Masonite
48 x 48 in | 121.9 x 121.9 cm
Marcia Hafif
Satin Black, 1989
enamel on wood
28 x 28 in | 71.1 x 71.1 cm
Dennis Hopper
Untitled (Paint Brush), 1982
acrylic on canvas with paint brush and tarp
73 x 48 in | 185.4 x 121.9 cm
Mike Kelley
American Landscape I,, 1980
acrylic on canvas with painted cardboard frame
26 x 25 1/2 in | 66 x 64.7 cm / framed: 28 1/4 x 27 3/4 in | 71.7 x 70.4 cm
John McCracken
Five Paintings III, 1974
polyester resin, fiberglass, and wood
32 x 48 x 2.5 in | 81.3 x 121.9 x 6.4 cm
Bruce Nauman
Untitled #4, 1966
cardboard, paint
7 x 24 x 7 in | 17.7 x 60.9 x 17.7 cm
Ken Price
Specimen CJ1303, 1964
fired and painted ceramic on painted wood and upholstered Artist’s base
overall: 6 1/4 x 8 15/16 x 9 15/16 in | 15.8 x 22.7 x 25.2 cm
Ed Ruscha
Rooster, 1988
aquatint and etching
sheet: 44 x 30 3/8 in | 111.7 x 77.1 cm /
framed: 52 x 38 x 2 in
Peter Alexander (1939, Los Angeles, CA – 2020, Santa Monica, CA) was a pioneer of the southern California-based “Light and Space” movement, and a seminal figure in the Los Angeles art scene. Central to Alexander’s lifelong exploration of materials was an intense focus on light and its manifold effects and qualities, as expressed in genre-defining sculptures, paintings, drawings, and prints.
Alexander was an avid surfer, immersed in 1960s L.A. surf culture. When he found the polyester resin he used to repair his boards had hardened into the circular shape of the Dixie cups holding the liquid, he knew he had discovered a new material for his artistic practice. This happenstance moment led to the luminous cast sculptures that defined the artist’s early career.
From 1965-1972, Alexander worked with these resins, producing his subtle, radiant, gently-hued sculptures that appeared crafted from light itself. In 1972, he turned to painting, drawing, and printmaking, developing an almost Impressionistic handling of media as he continued to describe light, suffusing his works with color and a palpable sense of atmosphere. Alexander’s vision was one of creating a generative object – an entity that appears to emit its own light and energy.
Peter Alexander earned his B.A. (1965) and M.F.A. (1966) from the University of California, Los Angeles prior to which he studied with Louis Kahn in the University of Pennsylvania’s Architecture program. Alexander was the recipient of numerous honors and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980) and the California Art Award (2014). He was artist-in-residence at institutions including California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA, 1970-71), University of Colorado (Boulder, CO, 1981), and Sarabhai Foundation (Ahmedabad, India, 1983).
Alexander’s work has been widely exhibited worldwide since the mid-1960s, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Diego Museum of Art, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; among others. His work is held in numerous institutional collections, including: The Getty, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.
In 1999, the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA) mounted a retrospective exhibition titled “Peter Alexander: In this Light”. Recent exhibitions include: The Bunker Artspace: Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, West Palm Beach, FL (2024); “On the Edge: Los Angeles Art 1970s–1990s from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection”, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (2024); “Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s–80s”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2023); “Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection”, Los Angeles County Art Museum, CA (2023); and “Light & Space”, Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark (2022).
Edith Baumann’s (b. 1948, Ames, IA) austere and abstract paintings are inspired by her decades-long daily meditation practice and her love for jazz, concisely balancing precision with vulnerability, motion, and natural imperfection. Using hand-mulled raw pigment acrylics, Baumann applies thin layers of paint to canvas using small brushes in order to establish a ground of varying depth, and finely-applied lines that hover and span, veil-like, across layered rectilinear fields. As the artist mines the sense of focus, balance, and concentration she achieves in a meditative state, she continues to explore the relationship between color and geometry and the tension between stasis and dynamism.
Art historian and critic Frances Colpitt once said, “In [Baumann’s] paintings, color is radiant, monochromatic fields breathe, and crisp edges quiver almost imperceptibly.” The geometric elements that appear throughout the artist’s works demand exacting structural execution, while the areas of floating, gauze-like color are the product of Baumann’s graceful and unrehearsed freehand.
“When painting, I move back and forth between the positive and negative space intuitively, changing the color – warmer, cooler, etcetera,” Baumann describes. “One area of color informs the other area.”
Edith Baumann received a B.F.A. from University of California, Los Angeles in 1975 and an M.F.A. in painting at the University of Southern California in 1985. She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Beatrix Wilhem Gallery (Stuttgart, Germany), parrasch heijnen (Los Angeles, CA), Newspace (Los Angeles, CA,); and Franklin Parrasch Gallery, (New York, NY); and group gallery and museum exhibitions at Analog Diary (Beacon, NY); Martos Gallery (New York, NY), McClain Gallery (Houston, TX), Hunter Dunbar (New York, NY), Bakersfield Museum of Art (Bakersfield, CA), Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, CA), and the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University (Waco, TX). Her work is held in such public institutional collections as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA). Edith Baumann lives and works in Santa Monica, CA.
Tony DeLap, (1927, Oakland, CA – 2019, Corona Del Mar, CA) long a fixture of the West Coast art scene, had an immeasurable impact on the course of contemporary art. He taught and mentored such California art luminaries as Bruce Nauman, John McCracken, and James Turrell. Along with John Coplans, DeLap was a member of the founding arts faculty at the University of California, Irvine when it opened in 1965. That same year, he was cited in Donald Judd’s seminal essay “Specific Objects”, which discussed the tendency among artists in the 1960s to work in the space between painting and sculpture.
Spatial enigmas and the use of illusionism were at the core of DeLap’s practice. While his work shares visual similarities with Minimalism, Op-Art, and Constructivism, the artist’s lifelong fascination with magic and sleight of hand (he was a trained magician, and received a Special Fellowship at the Academy of Magical Arts in 2017) greatly influenced the illusionistic qualities present in his art. DeLap’s work, shape-shifting between painting and sculpture, defies fixed categorization with its tension and variety. As Barbara Rose wrote in her 2014 essay Now You See it, Now You Don’t, “there really is no such thing as a ‘typical’ DeLap work, only typical DeLap visual reasoning.”
Having originally worked extensively with collage, DeLap’s early sculptures presented an idiosyncratic articulation of layered space in a decisively Minimalist mode, effectively representing a generation of West Coast artists who had moved away from spiritual abstraction in the 1960s toward conceptual, cerebral practices. At its core, DeLap’s work explores how the interaction of geometric shapes can create dimensionality and movement on static planes. In a 1980 essay, DeLap explained: “It is the discrepancy between the front edge or plane, and the back edge or plane, that is the primary content of the work. This discrepancy sets up an agitation with the wall and gives the paintings a somewhat unsettled physical appearance.”
DeLap exhibited extensively over the course of his career, beginning with a breakout exhibition at San Francisco’s Dilexi Gallery in 1963. Following an introduction to New York art dealer Robert Elkon by their mutual friend Agnes Martin in the early 1960s, he mounted ten exhibitions at Elkon Gallery over the course of 19 years. The artist went on to be represented by Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles, and finally parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles, who represents his estate.
Tony DeLap attended California College of Arts and Crafts (Oakland, CA) in 1944; Menlo Junior College (Menlo Park, CA) from 1945-47; Academy of Art (San Francisco, CA) from 1947-49; and Claremont Graduate School (Claremont, CA) from 1949-50. DeLap has been included in such landmark exhibitions as “The Responsive Eye” at Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum (New York, NY); and “American Sculpture of the Sixties” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA). In 2018, the Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, CA) mounted a major retrospective comprising works dating from 1961-2018, curated by Peter Frank and accompanied by a fully illustrated publication. DeLap’s work resides in the permanent collections of Tate Modern (London, UK); Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC); Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY); the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN); and Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne, Switzerland), among many others.
Born in 1937 in Oklahoma City, Joe Goode moved to Los Angeles in 1959 and 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, Ed Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud in the 1962 ground-breaking exhibit "New Painting of Common Objects", curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum). This historical exhibition was the first museum Pop Art exhibition in the United States.
Through the years, 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 the unique ways in which he continues to work.
Over the past fifty years, Goode’s work has been shown in hundreds of gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. His work is included in many major museum collections including: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (CA); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, (CA); the Menil Collection, (Houston, TX); the Smithsonian Institution, (Washington, D.C.); The Whitney Museum of American Art, (New York, NY); the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); the Victoria and Albert Museum, (London, UK); and the Moderna Museet, (Stockholm, Sweden). Joe Goode lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Marcia Hafif’s (1929, Pomona, CA – 2018, Laguna Beach, CA) fifty-plus year career spans pop-minimal painting, experimental photography and filmmaking, and conceptually driven monochromes and works on paper. Hafif planned a year-long trip to Florence in 1961, but settled in Rome, where she remained for almost eight years, painting and exhibiting her work. The artist returned to California in 1969, leaving painting for a time to experiment with film, photography, and sound installation. Exhibiting for more than eight years with Sonnabend Gallery in New York and Paris from 1974 to 1981, Hafif developed series of paintings that would become the basis of her iconic work The Inventory: 1974, Mass Tone Paintings; 1975, Wall Paintings; 1976, Pencil Drawings; 1978, Neutral Mix Paintings; 1979, Broken Color Paintings; and 1981, Black Paintings.
Central to the artist’s oeuvre was her interest in pursuing a highly methodical approach emphasizing the natural idiosyncrasies integral to the human touch. In 1978, Hafif wrote a seminal article in Artforum titled “Beginning Again,” in which she outlined the struggle of the contemporary painter in an era when the act of painting had been declared dead. Hafif cited Jacques Derrida’s phrase “under erasure” to describe the role of the painter - who many felt were left with little to divine in an already deeply mined practice - and pointed out the manner in which so many of her predecessors and contemporaries had found tension in an impossible state. It was at this time that Hafif committed to the monochrome approach for which she became most well-known, and which she continued to explore and expand upon for the remainder of her life.
Marcia Hafif earned a B.A. from Pomona College (Claremont, CA) in 1951 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine (Irvine, CA) in 1971. Hafif’s works have been exhibited extensively internationally. Major exhibitions include: An Extended Gray Scale, 5142 West Jefferson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Marcia Hafif: The Inventory: Painting, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Kunsthaus Baselland, St. Gallen and Muttenz, Switzerland, (2017); Marcia Hafif: The Italian Paintings 1961–69, Fergus McCaffrey, New York, NY, (2016); and Marcia Hafif: The Inventory: Painting, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (2015). Hafif’s work is held permanent museum collections including: Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Buffalo, NY), Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Kunsthaus Aarau (Aarau, Switzerland), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (St. Gallen, Switzerland), Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, CA), Mamco-Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Geneva, Switzerland), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA).
Multifaceted artist Dennis Hopper (1936, Dodge City, KS – 2010, Los Angeles, CA) devoted over five decades to his creative practice, exploring the mediums of photography, painting, sculpture, film, and installation. He began painting in earnest during the mid-1950s, initially creating multi-layered paintings in an abstract expressionist language characterized by thick application of oil paint, gritty, almost sand-like in texture and density. Best known for his acting, screenwriting, and directing career, Hopper often invoked his Hollywood surroundings in his imagery.
Throughout in the early 1960s, Hopper’s work incorporated assemblage and included readymade objects in a Dada-esque expression. Following the extensive 1961 Bel-Air (CA) fire which destroyed virtually all of his art, Hopper stopped painting and ventured into photography, using a Nikon camera given to him for his birthday by his then wife Brooke Hayward. He returned to painting in the early 1980s. The ideas he gleaned from friendships with Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, as well as Los Angeles-based artists such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, and Ed Kienholz contributed to the development of his core visual perspective. Hopper’s work responds to the sensibility of a place and time: Los Angeles in the 1960s, where a fresh, unique, and exciting cultural environment was being formed on the West Coast.
Dennis Hopper’s solo exhibitions include “American Pictures 1961–1967,” MAK Center, Los Angeles (2000); “International Traveling Retrospective Exhibition,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2001, traveled to Mak Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna); “Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood,” Australian Centre For The Moving Image, Melbourne (2009); “Double Standard,” The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2010); “L.A. and Friends—Photographs from the 60’s,” Art District, Le Royal Monceau, Paris (2011); “En el camino,” Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain (2013); “The Lost Album,” Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014); and “Part of Being an Artist: The Dennis Hopper Collection, Selected Artwork and Ephemera,” Hugh Hefner Exhibition Hall and Cinematic Arts Gallery, University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles (2014). His photographs are included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Hopper received several awards from the international community including being named a commander of the French Legion of Honor and receiving its highest award of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2008.
Mike Kelley (1954, Wayne, MI – 2012, South Pasadena, CA) is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time. Irreverent but deeply informed, topical yet visionary, Kelley worked in a startling array of genres and styles, including performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, photography, sound works, text, and sculpture. He also worked on curatorial projects; collaborated with many other artists and musicians; and left a formidable body of critical and creative writing. Starting out in the late 1970s with solo performances, image/text paintings, and gallery and site-specific installations, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of common craft materials. Featuring repurposed thrift store toys, blankets, and worn stuffed animals, the Half a Man series focused Kelley’s career-long investigation of memory, trauma, and repression, predicated on what the artist described as a “shared culture of abuse.”
Throughout his career Kelley sought to understand the cultures around him from the bottom up, scouring yard sales and yearbooks for their cast-offs and leftovers. He mined popular culture and both modernist and alternative traditions, which he set in relation to relentless self- and social examinations, by turns dark and delirious. With an inimitable mix of caustic skepticism and temporizing respect, he engaged the languages and assumptions of education, adolescence, crafts and DIY, holidays, pop psychology, parades and rituals, fandom, newspaper reportage, and modes of public address—producing a uniquely sustained address to the conditions and implications of the American vernacular.
Kelley has held numerous major museum exhibitions including 'Mike Kelley. Ghost and Spirit' at Tate Modern, London, UK (2024), and Bourse de Commerce, Paris, France (2023); 'Mike Kelley' at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2014); ‘Mobile Homestead and Goin’ Home. Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead Videos and Documentation’ at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI (2013); ‘Mike Kelley. Themes and Variations from 35 Years’ at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2012), ‘A Tribute to Mike Kelley’ at MOCA The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2012); ‘Mike Kelley. Profondeurs Vertes’ at Musée du Louvre, Paris, France (2006); ‘Mike Kelley. The Uncanny’ at Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK (2004); ‘Mike Kelley/Tony Oursler. The Poetics Project. 1977-1997’ at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2000); ‘Mike Kelley. Catholic Tastes’ at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (1994) and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (1993); and Mike Kelley’ at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1991).
John McCracken (1934, Berkeley, CA – 2011, New York, NY) occupies a singular position within the recent history of American art, as his work melds the restrained formal qualities of Minimalist sculpture with a distinctly West Coast sensibility expressed through color, form, and finish. McCracken developed his early sculptural work while studying painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases, the artist began to produce objects made with industrial materials, including plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin, creating the highly reflective, smooth surfaces for which he was to become known. As he described his practice, “In distilling my ideas I was doing something analogous to making poetry—trying, in a way, to say the most with the least.”
Beginning in the 1960s, McCracken exhibited steadily in the United States and abroad, and his early work was included in groundbreaking exhibitions such as Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, New York (1966), and American Sculpture of the Sixties at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967). In 1986, the major survey Heroic Stance: The Sculpture of John McCracken 1965–1986 was organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, and traveled to the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art), Newport Beach, California; Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine; and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas. In 2011, his work was the subject of a large-scale retrospective at Castello di Rivoli, Turin. Other significant solo shows include those hosted by the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (1995); Kunsthalle Basel (1995); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2004); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2009); and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, England (2012).
McCracken’s work has been prominently featured in major group exhibitions worldwide, including A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2004); The Los Angeles Art Scene, 1955–1985, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006); documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007); and Time & Place: Los Angeles 1957–1968, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008). Additionally, the artist’s work was in three shows organized as part of the 2011 region-wide initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 at the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California.
Bruce Nauman (b. 1941, Fort Wayne, IN) studied art, mathematics, and physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1960 to 1964. He went on to study under William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California at Davis, graduating with an MFA in 1966. In 1964, Nauman gave up painting and began experimenting with sculpture and Performance art and collaborated with William Allan and Robert Nelson on film projects. He supported himself by teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968, and at the University of California at Irvine in 1970.
Since the mid-1960s, the artist has created an open-ended body of work that includes sculptures, films, holograms, interactive environments, neon wall reliefs, photographs, prints, sculptures, videotapes, and performance. His Conceptual work stresses meaning over aesthetics; it often uses irony and wordplay to raise issues about existence and alienation, and increasingly it provokes the viewer’s participation and dismay.
In 1966, the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, held Nauman’s first solo exhibition. In 1968, the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, and the Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, initiated a long series of solo shows. Also in 1968, he was invited for the first time to participate in Documenta 4 in Kassel, and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that enabled him to work in New York for one year. In 1972, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work, which traveled in Europe and the United States. Nauman moved to New Mexico in 1979. A major retrospective was held at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, in 1981. Since the mid-1980s, primarily working with sculpture and video, he has developed disturbing psychological and physical themes incorporating images of animal and human body parts.
Nauman has received many honors, including an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989, the Max Beckmann Prize in 1990, the Wolf Prize in Arts-Sculpture in 1993, the Wexner Prize in 1994, the Leone d’Oro in 1999, an Honorary Doctorate of Art from California Institute of the Arts in 2000, and the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Visual Arts, Japan, in 2004. A Nauman retrospective was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and traveled to many venues throughout America and Europe from 1993 to 1995. In 1997, the Kunstmuseum Wolfburg mounted another major retrospective, which toured the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Hayworld Gallery in London and Nykytaiteen Museo in Helsinki. Since then, Nauman has had major solo exhibitions at DIA Center for the Arts (2002), Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (2003), Tate Modern (2004), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2005), Tate Liverpool (2006), Milwaukee Art Museum (2006), and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2007). Nauman represented the U.S. in the 2009 Venice Biennale. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.
Ken Price (1935, Los Angeles, CA – 2012, Arroyo Hondo, NM) was a relentlessly inventive artist, continually changing the forms, surfaces, colors, and shapes of his sculptures throughout his five-decade career. During the 1960s and 1970s he made diminutively scaled works whose innovative and occasionally outlandish shapes subverted the functionality of traditional ceramics. In the 1980s and 1990s he jettisoned receptacle-like forms and traded his glazes for acrylic paint, which he often applied to his bulbous clay forms in layers before sanding them down to create unique variegated multicolor patterns. Toward the end of his life he began working at a much larger scale, one that speaks directly to the viewer’s body, his sculptures’ smooth surfaces lacquered with iridescent colors to augment their seductive power.
Price was also an extraordinary draftsman, making drawings throughout his career that are as inventive as his sculpture. “I’ve been drawing since I can remember,” he said. “I think sculptors learn to draw so that they can see what they’ve been visualizing.” Some of these drawings depict impossible sculptures, like a cup with a leaping frog for a handle, while others envision a whole world for his works to inhabit. Los Angeles, complete with palm-studded skylines and smog-filled skies, was often the subject of his drawings before he moved to Taos, New Mexico in the 1990s and began producing wilder landscapes with erupting volcanoes and cyclonic skies.
Ken Price’s first one-person exhibition was at Los Angeles’ legendary Ferus Gallery in 1960, when he was just twenty-five, and critics lauded his work for its originality. (Lucy Lippard wrote, “No one else, on either the east or west coast, is working like Ken Price.”) His work was on the cover of Artforum in 1963, and he had a one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1969. In later years Price had one-person exhibitions at the Menil Collection in Houston, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Shortly after his death, in 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented a retrospective of his work, which traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2013 the Drawing Center in New York, in collaboration with Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, organized the first survey of Price’s works on paper.
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937, Omaha, NE) has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1956. His adopted city and its film industry are at the core of his visual language. At the start of his artistic career, Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist . . . who deals with subject matter.” Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse mediums with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial. “I just happened to paint words like someone else paints flowers,” Ruscha told Fred Fehlau in an article in Flash Art in 1988.
Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. After graduation, he began to work for ad agencies, honing his skills in schematic design and considering questions of scale, abstraction, and viewpoint, which became integral to his painting and photography. By the early 1960’s Ruscha was well known for his paintings, collages, and photographs, and for his association with the Ferus Gallery group, which also included artists Robert Irwin, John Altoon, Larry Bell, Ken Price, and Edward Kienholz.
The first retrospective of Ruscha’s drawings was held in 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He continues to experiment with form and make use of the American vernacular, reflecting on its evolution as online technologies alter the essence of human communication. Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005). ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2023 and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2024, the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective in more than twenty years.
Dark Illumination is on view Monday through Friday 11a-6p from March 20 through April 25, 2025 at 19 East 66th Street, Floor Three, New York, NY. An opening reception will take place Thursday, March 20, 6-8p. Appointments to view the exhibition during its run are not required but encouraged, and may be made by visiting https://fpg.as.me/schedule.php. For further information, please contact the gallery at info@franklinparrasch.com or (212) 246-5360.