Lynn Umlauf “Works (1974

Lynn Umlauf “Works (1974 – 1981)”

Zürcher Gallery

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Lynn Umlauf (1942¬) was born in Austin, Texas into a family of artists. Lynn graduated in Austin with a Bachelor’s degree, and also spent one year at the Academia di Belli Arti in Florence, Italy, then returned to the States to receive a Master’s degree from the University of Texas in 1966. She moved to New York in 1966-67. Madelon, her twin sister, introduced Lynn to the painter Michael Goldberg (1924 - 2008) in 1969, and they married 10 years later. Lynn first started showing in Italy. Her first show in New York was with the Hal Bromm Gallery, and her first museum inclusion was with the Whitney Biennial (1975).

Lynn has been spending half of each year living and working both at sculpture and painting, in Italy in a very old farmhouse in southern Tuscany. Her work has increasingly taken the form of large, on¬site installations. She also prowls the Italian countryside, making improvisatory drawings as inspiration. Drawings are closely connected to sculptures. The reason is when Lynn works on a sculpture she draws at the same time. Her method consists in using sanded and impregnated paper with pastel, watercolor or acrylic medium and often glued on free shaped canvases, which lends a handmade quality close to fresco. The result evokes analogies to shields and masks of primitive societies. But Lynn engages her work in a push and pull movement with inside outside ambiguities in live structures like painting in the air.

“The color is the first decision, then the space between, and since it’s not just going to be one color, the space between makes the composition of the two shapes. The decision about the medium starts out with what kind of paper. If I have a fairly good idea of how I want it to look, then I can decide whether to use light of heavy-weight paper to glue to canvas or not, depending on the scale, and how many points I’m going to hang it from.

I like illusion I’ve never seen a sculpture that has enough color. The color is the control to keep it from being sculpture. You sense a three – dimensional space because of the color rather than feeling. Color is my subject; it begins and ends with color. Color usually takes a shape. And because I try to work with two colors then the shapes begin to be the subject matter a colored shape. It’s too easy to start with red yellow blue everything that gets away from that begins to be a color. I don’t like red yellow and blue very much. I have to make up other colors besides that. Terracotta is a color I keep thinking about, It has a lot of purple and green, red and blue in it. And cement is another color.

I want to take the sensuality out of my works and leave only the physicality. I don’t refer to air and space I refer to light. A painting becomes so solid on the wall, the surface of it and the materials of it are more important than what it could look like. It’s not building or mountains or trees or people, it’s a shape that has been carved. The shape has been carved out of a piece of paper out of a piece of canvas and out of a piece of wall. We start with an object, as if we had come from a store. And to break it down into a personal shape I have to connect the top and the bottom and then the sides. From the top to the bottom is a cutting, and the sides – how much off the parallel they are going to be. Cutting is like making a clear drawing, like a drawing without ink. Not just without ink but when you cut away, cutting off the edges of the object you’re giving the centre of a shape a meaning, you’re giving a centre to that shape. So that’s one shape, and then it has to project, relate to what the other shapes are within the work.” (Excerpt from Lynn Umlauf with David Shapiro “Notes on My Work” Flash Art N. 74/75 May – June 1977)

As noticed by Klaus Kertess: “Wall, canvas, and paper become multiple layers of skin, adhering to and peeling away from each other. They are constantly formed and reform each other.” Lynn Umlauf, text by Klaus Kertess, Ferrara ed., 1979