Thursday, February 20, 10AM–7PM
Friday, February 21, 11AM–7PM
Saturday, February 22, 11AM–7PM
Sunday, February 23, 11AM–6PM
Visit Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Booth A13
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to return to Frieze Los Angeles with Sun, Moon, Stars, a group exhibition focused on celestial subjects in twentieth and twenty-first century American art. Produced amidst landmark advancements in the fields of astronomy and physics, the Space Race, the burgeoning environmental protection movement, and proliferating interest in Eastern spiritual systems, the works on view illuminate the century’s rapidly evolving fascination with the cosmos. Featured artists include Ruth Asawa, Hannelore Baron, Mary Bauermeister, William Baziotes, Romare Bearden, Harry Bertoia, Lee Bontecou, Joseph Cornell, Beauford Delaney, Claire Falkenstein, Morris Graves, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Alfred Jensen, Raymond Jonson, Yayoi Kusama, Ibram Lassaw, Norman Lewis, Alfonso Ossorio, Agnes Pelton, Richard Pousette-Dart, Theodore Roszak, Betye Saar, Pavel Tchelitchew, Alma Thomas, Bob Thompson, Charmion von Wiegand, William T. Williams, and Hale Woodruff.
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s presentation expands upon three exhibitions currently on view in PST ART: Art & Science Collide, namely Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pacific Standard Universe at the Griffith Observatory; and Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990 at the Palm Springs Art Museum. Exploring the “intersections of art and science, both past and present,” PST ART: Art & Science Collide is the latest iteration of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time initiative—now called PST Art—which takes place every five years at dozens of venues across Southern California.
Highlights of Sun, Moon, Stars include Expanding Oval in Gold (1970) by Claire Falkenstein (1908–1997), an exemplary painting from her celebrated Moving Point series, a body of works begun in the 1950s characterized by dynamic calligraphic fields of marks that coalesce into larger streams of interlocking sinews. Expanding Oval in Gold corresponds to Falkenstein’s monumental, nine-panel painting Orbit the Earth (Moving Point) (1963), currently on view in Particles and Waves. Exhibition co-curator Sharrissa Iqbal writes, “Falkenstein’s reflective metallic marks trace pathways across the work’s panels, insinuating the trajectory of a celestial object or spacecraft around the Earth.” Orbit the Earth (Moving Point) is one of seven works by Falkenstein featured in Particles and Waves, which brings together several generations of abstract artists whose work was concerned with light, energy, motion, and time.
Similarly, A Glimpse of Mars (1969) is a major painting by Alma Thomas (1891–1978) that embodies the chromatic richness of the “Red Planet.” Painted in the same year that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, A Glimpse of Mars expresses Thomas’ wonder and awe at “the vastness and incomprehensibility of space,” as she put it, through her iconic marks of vivid color. Abstraction also proved the ideal language to express a cosmic blend of human ritual and spiritual cosmology for Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983). Von Wiegand’s Vajrayana (1969) is a hard-edged geometric abstraction rendered in a radiant palette that incorporates symbols central to the rites of Vajrayana, a strain of Buddhism practiced in Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and Mongolia. A longtime devotee of Buddhism, von Wiegand forged a singular approach to her abstraction centered on the affinities between Western modernism and Eastern spirituality—a synthesis encapsulated in Vajrayana.