Frank O. Gehry and Andy Moses

SEPTEMBER 9, 2006 - OCTOBER 14, 2006

Presented as Patricia Faure Gallery at Bergamot Station, Santa Monica.

Frank O. Gehry and Andy Moses
September 9 - October 14, 2006

Frank O. Gehry

Frank's Drawings: Eight Museums by Gehry will exhibit two decades of drawings by the acclaimed Toronto-born, Los Angeles-based architect, Frank Owen Gehry. The exhibition, initially presented at the University of Toronto Art Centre from 18 February to 17 June 2006, will be on view in the Patricia Faure Gallery’s Project Gallery from 9 September 2006 to 14 October 2006.

Spanning 25 years, from 1979 to 2004, the exhibition will include 49 original pen-on-paper drawings of eight museum projects by Gehry: the Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem), the Samsung Museum of Modern Art (Seoul), the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum (Biloxi), the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis), the Panama Bridge of Life, Museum of Biodiversity (Panama City), and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). A selection of Gehry’s sketchbooks from the late 70s and early 80s, along with an array of telephone-pad/thumbnail sketches never before shown, will bracket the core display of 49 drawings. A unique, 3-D “wire drawing” commissioned by Gehry for the University of Toronto Art Centre show will also be displayed.

-more-Before a building is designed and constructed, the architect imagines it—and somehow this idea must be externalized. With Frank Gehry, this translation happens first through the medium of drawings, moving from mind to hand to paper. Through his spontaneous, delicate “wirey” drawings, representations of three-dimensional volumes and forms begin to emerge, along with notions of functional space allocation and building materials. Following these first idea-sketches, Gehry works with rough cardboard models. After that, his staff further develops the projects using sophisticated digital modelling. Gehry’s distinctive, highly sculptural, architectural language typically evolves through this complex process – moving from idea-sketch to cardboard model to 3-D digital image and, sometimes, back again to further wirey drawings. For Frank Gehry it is a circular creative process: from mind to hand to eye, then back to mind again.

Frank's Drawings: Eight Museums by Gehry is curated by former University of Toronto Dean and now Professor of Architecture, Larry Wayne Richards, who has known Gehry and assessed his work since the early 1980s. “This is a rare opportunity to see Frank Gehry’s mind and hand at work and to see some of the spontaneous, generating drawings that have led to his astonishing architecture,” says Richards.

Frank's Drawings: Eight Museums by Gehry is organized by the University of Toronto Art Centre and supported by The Abraham and Malka Green Foundation, the University of Toronto Provost and Dean of Arts & Science, the Ontario Arts Council, University College and Supporting Sponsor Manulife Financial.

Andy Moses

For this special event, Andy Moses has created a selection of large abstract paintings on both concave and convex canvases. These works have the appearance of vast landscapes, while the unusual shapes of the canvases reference the liquid movement of waves. The iridescent hues of paint create a subtle luminosity, inviting the viewer to walk around the works, to experience their changes in nuance and color from every new perspective. The paintings not only shift with vantage point, they also respond to changes in the surrounding environment, absorbing continuous shifts in natural and artificial light.

The interplay between space, color and light is an enduring thematic exploration with Moses.

-more-His tendency is to push the physical and metaphorical limitations of paint—to imbue the dried, solid medium with a visual liquidity that mirrors water in how it travels and spreads across surfaces. Moses’ work exists within the wide expanse between abstraction and representation, feeling at once familiar, yet full of unknown possibilities.

Moses grew up in Santa Monica, and maintains a studio in Venice, California, where his love of the ocean continues to inspire and inform his work.

REVIEW

By Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2006

With Andy Moses' new abstract paintings, bigger is better. His show at Patricia Faure Gallery, the artist's second and best solo at the gallery, includes several canvases that are more than 5 feet high and 11 feet wide. The surface of each is concave, bowing in gently toward the center, which results in a painting that recalls a 1950s Cinerama screen.

The palette is dominated by cobalt blue. The intense acrylic color is traversed by horizontal vapor trails of white and, here and there, cream, red and other hues. Each line starts off crisp and defined, but it loosens and fuzzes as it reaches the other side. The paintings are resolutely abstract, but they recall the perceptual warp of aerial flight and a television screen that's gone on the fritz.

Moses' smaller canvases suffer by comparison, because they condense the visual sweep in the way a snapshot does. (Suddenly they become little landscapes.) But the big pictures fuse languorous contemplative bliss with a heightened, sexy glamour. Think of it as Tantric abstraction.