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拍品专文
“Yes, I purposefully looked at a lot of cars, especially the finely finished ones, to see colors and surfaces…The first sculptures I made were of plywood sprayed with car lacquers…Finally, through experiments, I realized that if you pour a thickness of resin onto a flat surface, it pools out and you can get a really flat surface. I make real, physical forms, but they’re made out of color, which as a quality is at the outset abstract. I try to use color as if it were material.” (J. McCracken in F. Colpitt, “Between Two Worlds” in Art in America, April 1998, p. 88)
“Their bright colors, slick, shiny surfaces and ready-made designs signal McCracken’s rejection of the appearance of the hand-crafted and align his work with Pop Art and with actual objects of popular culture” (E. Tepfer, “Object and Authorship: Pictorial Practice in the 1990s” in Painting Zero Degree, exh. cat., Cranbrook Museum of Art, Bloomfield Hills, 2000, p. 34).
In John McCracken’s Flower, color, form and space become inseparable and occupy the previously vacant environment between the floor and the wall. Deployed in the form of eight solid and highly reflective elements, Flower becomes a bold interruption in the space traditionally overlooked by the conventional categorization of wall based painting and floor based sculpture. Though the arrangement is suffused with space and light, the elegance of these pieces commands their location with a seriousness and dignity, reaching up from the floor to the ceiling; an example of the artist signature form, Flower resonates in the expansive scope of its individual eight elements.
McCracken’s work is associated with West Coast minimalism and his explorations opened up the genre with a new form of expansiveness as the artist adopted industrial techniques and materials–plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin–to create his highly reflective, smooth surfaces. However, unlike Donald Judd, who often had works industrially fabricated to eschew all signs of the artist’s hand, McCracken resolutely created these forms himself, finishing each work to the highly lacquered finish for which he is celebrated. By placing the final forms against a wall they evoke in turns a surfboard and the flanks of a custom car. The geometry of this particular iteration, industrial materials used in the work call back to these deeply Californian motifs.
Combined with the reflective surface, the vibrant palette gives Flower an ethereal and almost otherworldly quality to the space in which it rests, and the artist himself often evoked the spiritual or extraterrestrial when looking for language to describe his oeuvre. By leaning the elements against a wall, straddling space, the intention was to connect the spheres of two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculpture, and in turn, create a bridge between the physical and the spiritual.
John McCracken, born in 1934, in Berkeley, California, was the son of an engineer, inventor and cattle-rancher. After serving in the United States Navy, he enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he earned his BFA in 1962 and pursued a MFA. The artist studied with painter Gordon Onslow Ford and sculptor Tony DeLap and developed his early sculptural work while studying painting at the school, working in a gestural Abstract Expressionism. By the early 1960s, he developed an abstract Pop art with geometric emblems and signs in painted relief. McCracken’s early sculpture began to pick up on the architectural forms of painted wood which would later characterize his most sought after works and by 1966 he had perfected the long and narrow, a polished monochromatic rectangle that shone as it leaned on wall and floors.
McCracken was part of the Light and Space movement, which also includes such luminaries James Turrell, Peter Alexander, and others. The artist cited his greatest influences as the hard edge works of the Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman and Minimalists like Donald Judd and was one of the few members of his cohort who did not object to the movement’s name, embracing the focus on perception, creating with light, volume and scale, and the use of industrial materials such as glass, neon, fluorescent lights, resin and cast acrylic. The sense of play in his minimalist works was embraced, distinctly his own and invoking his California roots. McCracken has been included in every important exhibition of Minimalist sculpture in both the United States and Europe, beginning in 1996 with “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum and again in 1967 "American Sculpture of the Sixties" at the Los Angeles County Museum. In 1986, he was honored with a major survey exhibition organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, titled Heroic Stance: The Sculpture of John McCracken 1965-1986.
“Their bright colors, slick, shiny surfaces and ready-made designs signal McCracken’s rejection of the appearance of the hand-crafted and align his work with Pop Art and with actual objects of popular culture” (E. Tepfer, “Object and Authorship: Pictorial Practice in the 1990s” in Painting Zero Degree, exh. cat., Cranbrook Museum of Art, Bloomfield Hills, 2000, p. 34).
In John McCracken’s Flower, color, form and space become inseparable and occupy the previously vacant environment between the floor and the wall. Deployed in the form of eight solid and highly reflective elements, Flower becomes a bold interruption in the space traditionally overlooked by the conventional categorization of wall based painting and floor based sculpture. Though the arrangement is suffused with space and light, the elegance of these pieces commands their location with a seriousness and dignity, reaching up from the floor to the ceiling; an example of the artist signature form, Flower resonates in the expansive scope of its individual eight elements.
McCracken’s work is associated with West Coast minimalism and his explorations opened up the genre with a new form of expansiveness as the artist adopted industrial techniques and materials–plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin–to create his highly reflective, smooth surfaces. However, unlike Donald Judd, who often had works industrially fabricated to eschew all signs of the artist’s hand, McCracken resolutely created these forms himself, finishing each work to the highly lacquered finish for which he is celebrated. By placing the final forms against a wall they evoke in turns a surfboard and the flanks of a custom car. The geometry of this particular iteration, industrial materials used in the work call back to these deeply Californian motifs.
Combined with the reflective surface, the vibrant palette gives Flower an ethereal and almost otherworldly quality to the space in which it rests, and the artist himself often evoked the spiritual or extraterrestrial when looking for language to describe his oeuvre. By leaning the elements against a wall, straddling space, the intention was to connect the spheres of two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculpture, and in turn, create a bridge between the physical and the spiritual.
John McCracken, born in 1934, in Berkeley, California, was the son of an engineer, inventor and cattle-rancher. After serving in the United States Navy, he enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he earned his BFA in 1962 and pursued a MFA. The artist studied with painter Gordon Onslow Ford and sculptor Tony DeLap and developed his early sculptural work while studying painting at the school, working in a gestural Abstract Expressionism. By the early 1960s, he developed an abstract Pop art with geometric emblems and signs in painted relief. McCracken’s early sculpture began to pick up on the architectural forms of painted wood which would later characterize his most sought after works and by 1966 he had perfected the long and narrow, a polished monochromatic rectangle that shone as it leaned on wall and floors.
McCracken was part of the Light and Space movement, which also includes such luminaries James Turrell, Peter Alexander, and others. The artist cited his greatest influences as the hard edge works of the Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman and Minimalists like Donald Judd and was one of the few members of his cohort who did not object to the movement’s name, embracing the focus on perception, creating with light, volume and scale, and the use of industrial materials such as glass, neon, fluorescent lights, resin and cast acrylic. The sense of play in his minimalist works was embraced, distinctly his own and invoking his California roots. McCracken has been included in every important exhibition of Minimalist sculpture in both the United States and Europe, beginning in 1996 with “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum and again in 1967 "American Sculpture of the Sixties" at the Los Angeles County Museum. In 1986, he was honored with a major survey exhibition organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, titled Heroic Stance: The Sculpture of John McCracken 1965-1986.