Art Under Assault
'Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962'|
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Oct. 6-Jan. 14
The premise of a new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is deceptively simple: The show surveys nearly 100 canvases that have been assaulted, creatively, by their makers—either by scarring, ripping, cutting or burning—during the unsettling years after World War II.
The museum says that by upending the traditional idea of the canvas as a window-pane-like portal into a faraway world, these artists collectively transformed painting into sculpture—a mixed-media move that artists have been grappling with ever since.
Expect plenty of unusual materials to pop up in these pieces, including the canvas, welded steel and wire constructions that animate Lee Bontecou's abstracts, such as the above untitled work from 1962.
There are also smashed glass bottles embedded in Shozo Shimamoto's lime-colored "Cannon Picture" from 1956 and bits of fur stuck within Kazuo Shiraga's red 1963 abstract, "Wildboar Hunting."
—Kelly Crow