Interesting interactions between art and architecture are diverse and plentiful on this campus. Right now, you can contemplate architectural minimalism as a foil for ancient Olmec sculpture in the Resnick Pavilion; study a wall of Impressionist masters in a gallery illuminated by a bank of windows overlooking the palm trees of Wilshire Boulevard; and be captivated by the emotive brushwork of seventeenth-century Zen monks in the luminous natural light of Bruce Goff’s Pavilion for Japanese Art.
But a new installation on the top floor of BCAM has me ascending the escalator over and over again lately.
Curator Franklin Sirmans installed Color & Form, a selection from the Broad Collection, on the east side of the building’s top floor. Works by Imi Knoebel, John McCracken, Christian Eckart, Gunther Forg, and Peter Halley populate the vast white walls beneath the Renzo Piano skylights.
The installation is interesting on a number of levels. In terms of the story of art history, it ties in directly with the Blinky Palermo show one level down (Palermo and Knoebel were close). It also continues a story begun with our 2009 Joseph Beuys installation, as Knoebel and Palermo were his students. It extends an investigation of color and form begun by an earlier generation of European modernists like Malevich and Mondrian (our Mondrian is on view one building over in the Ahmanson galleries.) And it suggests a thread of continuity leading right up through Jeff Koons (in galleries adjacent to Color and Form) and beyond. (Halley and Koons were peers in the New York art scene of the 1980s.)
So it’s a presentation with a lot of connective tissue. But all of that aside, I enjoy seeing people moving through these skylit galleries. They look spectacular and randomly choreographed populating that landscape of big, vivid, paintings. When we were editing the video interview with Frankin, below, I found that the silent b-roll images of visitors passing through the galleries were accidentally beautiful unto themselves.
The curator thoughtfully left certain walls empty, a visual breath between affecting fields of strong color. (Peter Halley’s Initial Sequence is a downright electrifying orange.) He also included enough benches so that you can rest and be enveloped by the environment of the galleries.