"Real Op" Exhibition
Parallel Art Space
This event has ended.
Op art, as a movement, grew in public interest through the late 50’s until well into the 1970’s with patterned, dizzying artworks by such key proponents as Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley, that pointedly trick and confounded the visual senses, centering on the very modus of seeing itself, and the mechanisms by which the human eye will process and order visual “reality”. With roots including Mondrian, Albers and the Bauhaus, this style of art, while residing in the tropes of all-over abstraction, had much more in common with the formalist progenitors of pictorial illusion than with the expressionists of their own day. Their sphere of interest was the science, math and immutable laws governing the assimilation of visual information; the tricks and techniques employed less the province of poetry or politics and more the domain of the material, the physiological and the real.
It is this sensibility and concern with the real that the artists within Real Op, take and turn on it’s head just a bit. In each of these artist’s visual abstractions, which exist comfortably within the qualifications of Op Art, their starting points are based in reality, upon observed phenomena. Their works, then, are not solely concerned with the mechanics of appearance and visual trompe l’oeil but also with the mechanics of seeing and the tried and true formalist dictates of responding to an observed world.
Media
Schedule
from January 12, 2013 to February 17, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-01-12 from 18:00 to 21:00