Craig Kauffman: Works from the 1960s at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York

Craig Kauffman: Works from the 1960s
Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York
November 11 - December 21, 2004

Franklin Parrasch Gallery presents an exhibition of select works from the mid to late 1960s by Los Angeles born artist Craig Kauffman. This exhibition of six works provides a small window to view the developing concepts and discoveries Craig Kauffman made within this intriguing and productive five year period.

Craig Kauffman began his career in the mid-1950's as an abstract painter exhibiting in Los Angeles first at Felix Landau Gallery then at Ferus Gallery, throughout its nine year history. Craig Kauffman's early work explored figure/ground relationships as defined by color, saturation and image density. By the mid 1960's Craig Kauffman became intrigued by commercial plastic signs in the Los Angeles area, particulary with vacuum formed plastic in which figurative elements were rendered in vibrantly colored relief along a background plane.

Craig Kauffman's initial forays with industrially produced plastic resulted in a series of flat rectangular planes embossed with convex linear (somewhat phallic) imagery, the versos of which were printed in vibrantly contrasting colors. These works, while pioneering in their execution retained many of the aesthetic gestures addressed in his previous paintings and drawings.

It was not until his next series of mold-formed plastic works, euphemistically referred to as "Washboards," that Craig Kauffman abandoned altogether the identifiable centralized image and embraced the ambiguous depth of field inherently produced by this industrially colored medium. These undulating rectangular reliefs create a funhouse mirror-like effect with color and light.

The convex reliefs from the Washboard series establishes a basis from which later experimentations with vacuum formed plastic led to a series of horizontal ellipses Craig Kauffman called "Bubbles." Merging qualities of pigment, plastic, and light, the "Bubble" successfully produced a range of formal and spatial arrangements that furthered this artist's ongoing investigations of perception. In these works (produced from 1967-1968) Craig Kauffman ceased all application of exterior pigmentation, as well as any iconic lines or gestural imagery. Using an industrial sprayer Craig Kauffman painted the interiors of these lozenge shaped forms with a specialized enamel commercially known as "Morano." "Morano," a specialized pearlescent lacquer, produced an exquisitely chatoyant surface that simultaneously reflects and refracts light. It was a toxic, extremely expensive material and had only a short lived commercial application in the then popular spector of hot rod industry.

Craig Kauffman's plastic forms once again morphed and evolved. He realized that plastic's innate tendency to atrophe from its own weight could be used to create a loop shape by slumping a 1/4 inch sheet over wire. Gradations of altering colors and the confluence of the back ground plane and the foreground (looping) plane vary the viewer's chromatic experience based on proximity and light. Cascading bands of translucent (Rothko-esque) pigmentation on the slumped plastic sheet bathe the background wall in varegated color.

Over the past two years Craig Kauffman's early work has been reexamined in a number of group exhibitions including "Ferus" at Gagosian Gallery in 2002, "LA's Finish Fetish" at Franklin Parrasch Gallery in 2003, and "A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958 - 1968," Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles the spring of 2004.

FRANKLIN PARRASCH GALLERY
20 W 57th St (between 5th and 6th aves.), New York, NY 10019
www.franklinparraschgallery.com