Fidel A. Danieli

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  print March 1967

  Craig Kauffman

  Most important in Craig Kauffman’s new work at the Ferus/Pace Gallery is the “disappearance” of the mechano-organic shapes which were his individual forte. These shapes, biomorphic, eccentric cams and linear capsular shafts, first emerged painted and outlined upon sheets of clear plastic. In the following move the shapes were molded, protruding from the surface, and transparently dyed. Now, retaining the rectangular format but sacrificing those earlier trademarks, he indicates a painter’s concern for the traditional picture plane, though it be a relief.

  The unexpected progression is that the

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  print March 1967

  Jerry McMillan

  Jerry McMillan is a talented young photographer modestly showcased at the Pasadena Art Museum. At their simplest his works are vignetted, i.e., isolated, in round-cornered, wide borders and mounted upon framed grounds in the fashion of drawings. Others, in irregular formats, also call attention to the variety of presentation possibilities for photographs besides that of matting for a portfolio. These cut out manipulations are seen usually in magazines or in advertising and one rather wishes they didn’t strike so close so often to frank commercial application.

  Photographs within other photographs,

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  print February 1967

  Dan Flavin

  Dan Flavin’s first West Coast presentation at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery has given him the opportunity to fulfill his wish to execute an all-white show. His art is the deployment of fluorescent tubing (cool white in this case) in various configurations which he carefully terms “image-objects.” To judge from the successful installation, his art is easily situational or environmental; at its conception he relates a compositional idea to its specific exhibition site. At the same time each piece is clear enough to maintain its individual integrity.

  The fluorescent tube is a factual medium and its

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  print February 1967

  Louise Nevelson

  Inaugurating the new Ferus/Pace gallery are three large plastic constructions of Louise Nevelson. Her former wood assemblages have been modified to the extent that designed maquettes of a geometric nature are executed in lucite; in effect she has gracefully turned the manufacture of her works to others while exercising complete control. The black plastic exists in both dully lustrous and shiny versions. The color pervades the work, unifying the various compositions more convincingly than in the previous single color coats of paint, for differences in form source (handmade, machined, and scrap

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  print February 1967

  Frank Gallo

  Viewed at the Felix Landau Gallery, Frank Gallo’s epoxy resin figures fall into a unique stylishness recalling the voluptuousness of a more languorous period. Pointedly posed and poised they exhibit enormous taste, chic, and graphic detailing usually associated with fashion illustration, or more accurately, a fin-de-siecle decadence. The plastic seems freely molded, cut, and etched (a sharp tool carving and drawing) and stained with pigment. (The source for the etched or drypoint line quality may be found in the work of Mauricio Lasansky at the State University of Iowa where Gallo received his

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  print February 1967

  Iain Baxter

  The “It” show of this past spring is followed by the hollow, mocking humor of “Thing Company,” the proliferating invention of Iain Baxter at the Rolf Nelson Gallery. This English-born, Canadian based young sculptor manufactures “accessories” for some of the better-known works of art of our times. There is, for example, a polka dotted slip cover for a Don Judd wall piece, or a quart or so of yellow fluid, in a clear plastic bag, for Claes Oldenburg’s soft toilets. Into clear, inflatable plastic bags of diverse sizes and shapes go other things as well, clouds for instance, and landscapes. Baxter

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  print January 1967

  Picasso Prints, Albers Lithographs

  Printmaking has provided Picasso with as potent an auxiliary medium as drawing, collage, sculpture, and writing. At once peripheral to the main core of painted production—oils producing the major motifs for graphic reproduction––his prints are also essential to these theses, and, at their most concentrated, high caliber individual statements.

  The sequence of sixty years of work in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition impresses by its staggering volume. Through some 540 examples, less than one-fourth his total production, a clear comprehensiveness of the broad range of differing

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  print December 1966

  New Work by Friedel Dzubas

  SINCE HIS APPEARANCE IN Clement Greenberg’s Post Painterly Abstraction exhibition in 1964 Friedel Dzubas, in a one-man show at Nicholas Wilder Gallery, has changed rather remarkably. Dzubas has not simply entrenched or even extended his style, but has revived and consolidated a number of pictorial concepts of forty or more years ago.

  Dzubas presents a variety of formats: a large upright rectangle reserved for tallish ovoids packed at the right side, extremely long rectangles, and banded rectangles with an alternate position of either vertical or horizontal. The first are appropriate reminders of

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  print November 1966

  “Four” in L.A.

  AN EXHIBITION CALLED “FOUR” at Cali­fornia State College at Los Angeles presents the work of several artists little-seen in the La Cienega galleries. In the exhibition are Howard Bond, Charles Emerson, Shirley Pettibone and Thomas Eatherton.

  Viewed mid-change, the main body of Howard Bond’s work is composed of forcefully obvious geometric illu­sions. Whereas numerous practition­ers of optical or geometric painting have utilized the Renaissance system of single-point perspective (as Cun­ningham and Riley), other individuals (locally Bell, Davis, DeFrance) turned several years ago to the isometric

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  print Summer 1966

  Tony DeLap

  These recent sculptures mark a radical step in Delap’s logical development from a shallow picture plane to a fully realized, three-dimensional definition of space. First came the now well known inverse reliefs, then a bar-like lengthening, a gradual move to the bent bar and now a bent strip clean of all surface enrichment but color. The bellows-like step sequence into depth to an enclosed pierced hole invited viewer participation by arousing an air of expectancy of mysterious but functional usage. While the iconic enclosure is gone, except as space is now trapped in a mirroring reversed length,

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  print Summer 1966

  Clark Murray

  A pervading feeling that much recent reductive geometric work echoes the spirit of arbitrary adventure found in post-Cubist developments of thirty to fifty years ago is again reinforced. That Murray is au courant is as obvious as his less-than-tenuous links with Malevich’s Suprematism.

  Murray’s paintings, metal pane is braced at their edges, are shaped canvas substitutes. Each is sprayed a single color of automotive lacquer. Large, dominating the wall, the oblique quadrilaterals are angled diagonally like a remarkable accent or exclamation point. The premise that a painting is an object is fully

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  print Summer 1966

  Ruth Rossman

  Rossman’s recent development has been the discovery of subject matter which is motivated, posed, and poised in direct and convincing relationship to her style of figure distortion. The figures vary between the inertly volumetric seen in the park bench rester and veiled Mexican vigil keepers, and the frantically gesturing yet automaton-like go-go dancers and musicians. The locale shifts between the exotically foreign and the equally exotic youthful generation.

  Where architectonic props were formerly used, they now resemble scrims which open and close the space and are utilized for their design