15 March 2015

Yellow...

On the left, Sigmar Polke, Vase II, 1965; on the right, Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled (Collage), 1975.

"... two series of paintings that he instituted in 1963, Grid Pictures and Fabric Pictures, in both of which he played with codes, disguises and processes by which familiar things were made to seem strange. The Grid Pictures, such as Vase II (1965; Düsseldorf, Kstmus.), were painted with the aid of epidiascopes and slide projections, usually from crude half-toned newspaper photographs; this technical procedure may have been prompted by the example of Andy Warhol’s screenprinted paintings based on similar source material. The scattered dots in more complex works such as Crowd (distemper on canvas, 1.80×1.95 m, 1969; Bonn, Städt. Kstmus.) form a virtually abstract pattern that makes the imagery almost invisible when viewed from near the surface. Graphic alterations help to increase this sense of unfamiliarity, blurring the boundary between the objective reproduction of reality and the subjective production of art." says MoMA.

In the Diebenkorn exhibition at the RA, another of his collage pieces was described as "joined paper". [It might be an idea to describe patchwork as "joined fabric"?]

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