Works
by fifteen emerging, midcareer, and established artists from
the United States and Mexico are featured in this vibrant
exhibition that explores the use of color in contemporary
sculpture. Frances Colpitt, the exhibition's curator, notes
in her catalogue that color has recently reasserted itself
in three dimensional work with a force that has not been seen
since the 1960s. Indeed, polychromy in sculpture has not been
traditionally embraced by Anglo-European artists influenced
by the imagined "purity" of Greek and Roman marbles--despite
the fact that these antiquities were frequently brightly painted.
As Colpitt writes: "From Joachim Winckelmann to Clement Greenberg,
theorists have demanded that each art form be true to its
essential nature, with the implication that color belongs
to painting and is superfluous in sculpture." This exhibition
aims to explode that notion.
Included in the Chromaform show
are Chris Finley, Caren Furbeyre, David Grant, George Stoll, and Carlos
Mollura, all working in Los Angeles; New Yorkers Polly Apfelbaum, Lillian
Ball, Peter Boynton, Jessica Stockholder, and Daniel Wiener; Melanie Smith
and Thomas Glassford, both from Mexico City; Hills Snyder of San Antonio;
John McCracken of Medanales, New Mexico; and Richard Rezac of Chicago.
The exhibition's curator selected the artists based on their innovative
contributions to the expanded idiom of sculpture and their bold use of
color. Following Donn Judd's view that color is "like material" and that
it is "what art is made from," John McCracken commented that in his own
work he creates "real, physical forms, but they're made out of color....I
try to use color as if it were a material; I make sculpture out of say,
'red' or 'blue'." McCracken, for whom color has been a primary factor
in his work over more than 30 years, forms a link between the generation
of the Minimalists and the younger artists included in Chromaform.
A wide—and sometimes wild—variety of materials are used by these
sculptors: plastics, found objects, crushed velvet, rubber, glass, wax,
and other media are employed in works to explore concepts ranging from
ideas of domesticity and consumerism to more purely formal concerns and
the process of seeing itself. The exhibition was organized by the Art Gallery
at the University of Texas at San Antonio with support from the Elizabeth
Firestone Graham Foundation.
