Virtual Exhibit: Obscure: Andrew Forge, Issey Miyake, Gerhard Richter
The truth is that no one knows quite how to describe the art of Andrew Forge, Issey Miyake and Gerhard Richter, and that is a good thing. What synchronizes these three together is the sheer sense of shrouded mystery evoked by the dense, systematic mark making of each. Each is rooted in figurative representation, but has transcended into a supernatural world of abstraction, exploring the technical possibilities of the paint or fabric. This is an undulating space of shape shifting, color metamorphose, and surface that waxes and wanes. The viewer must take an intense, holistic look to quietly reveal internal mysteries.
It is no coincidence that the artists have each experienced the ideological impact of World War II as part of their youth: Forge in England, Miyake only two miles from Ground Zero in Hiroshima, and Richter in East Germany. As a result, the rejection of structured rules is prevalent, and, in its place, nature takes course. As much as the finished work unfolds before the viewer, it has unfolded in process with its creator. The surface, rhythm and density dictate the composition. Occasionally, through the lush formation, the shape of a body or landscape seems to appear, only to disappear and cause reconsideration.
Each artist achieves this with his own developed language and scale. Formally speaking, Forge employs nearly imperceptible units of dots and dashes, painted in gouache, watercolor, or oil on paper or canvas. Most of his work is in manageable scale, generally no larger than two or three feet in dimension. Miyake utilizes specialized “memory” pleating techniques that become lost and found in fabric, as well as origami-like folding. His work relates to human scale, but plays with measurement and proportion. Richter applies broad, sweeping oil paint gestures that allude to pushing and pulling. The paint at times appears peeled or gashed, creating questions about additive and subtractive process. His canvases engulf the viewer. They are generally six to nine feet tall.
To better understand the language each artist is speaking, it makes sense to look briefly at history and influences. As a painter, critic, teacher, and former dean of painting at Yale School, Andrew Forge’s painting lent sensitivity to his criticism, and his academic pursuits even currently color the viewer’s understanding of his art. To begin, Forge was born in Hastingleigh, England in 1923. While working as a critic, he taught at the Slade School and then at Goldsmith’s in London in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In 1972, he moved to the United States to teach at Yale and the New York Studio School. He remained at both for nearly 30 years, until his death in 2002. Simultaneously, Forge’s painting career began in the 1950’s with loosely figurative realism, beginning the relationship between mark making and image construction. In the 1960’s, Forge abandoned this style for the abstraction of perception seen in this exhibit. Satisfied with his decision, Forge spent the next decade developing a formal language that linked the influences of Monet, Seurat, and Mark Rothko.
Forge’s paintings from the 1980’s, 1990’s, and turn of the century demonstrate a converging of concise units, applied meticulously and numerously. What emerges are luminous, kinetic-looking fields that seem to change before the viewer’s eyes. Having played with areas of density and adjusted the mark-making as the abstraction unfolds, Forge provided great mystery. Sometimes there is an allusion to landscapes or torsos. Sometimes there appears to be a dominant color. One can never be quite sure in such a peculiar space and gains greater insight through a long, hard look, something that Forge, himself, highly recommended.
Miyake was born in 1938 in Hiroshima Japan, two miles from Ground Zero. Like Forge and Richter, his work incorporates a rejection of wartime ideals. He often describes trading these ideals for his sister’s stash of American and French fashion magazines. This led him to study graphic design at the Tama Art University in Tokyo. The school was in re-build phase from prior bombing raids and was expending rapidly. At Tama, fabric and graphic design merged and included concepts in engineering and sculpture. After graduating in 1964, Miyake worked in Paris and New York City for Guy LaRoche, Hubert de Givenchy, and Geoffrey Beene. In 1970, he returned to Tokyo and founded the Miyake Design Studio, which debuted its first Paris collection in 1973.
Like the paintings in this exhibit, Miyake’s garments defy immediate interpretation. Though his history is rooted in the classic lines of couture fashion, he has, over the years, experimented with technological advances to create mysterious fabric surfaces, shifts in density, and shapes that metamorphose before the viewer. Miyake uses specialized pleating that is applied after the garment is constructed. His vision of shapes and folding relate to origami. It’s not unusual to see the clothing hung from the ceiling or flattened on the floor. This is a testament to its ability to transcend the figure.
Richter was born in Dresden in communist East Germany in 1932. He shared the common German postwar experience of having relatives that were both victims of and sympathizers with the Nazis. Consequently, Richter overtly rejects ideologies and, when he does speak about his artwork, acknowledges the inevitable influence of nature. He attended school until tenth grade, at which point he apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter. In the early 1950’s, Richter attended the Dresden Art Academy. A few months prior to the building of the Berlin Wall, he and his wife fled with only a suitcase to Düsseldorf in West Germany. Following, from 1961 to 1964, Richter studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Gotz. Here he gained access to western art movements and was influenced to explore the potential of the painting medium. In 1963, Richter and his German contemporaries Sigmar Polke and Konrad Fischer coordinated Life with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism.
Throughout his career, Richter has intentionally avoided the comfort of becoming homogeneous, therefore utilizing multiple painting methods. Both his blurred photo-realist and abstract techniques have developed and sharpened simultaneously. In both, there is unified support that images or ideals are to be questioned and reality is a process of imagination and re-imagination. The abstract paintings represented in this exhibit, though nonrepresentational, use the same techniques seen in Richter’s representational paintings: blurring and scraping to obscure and expose layers. The paintings evolve spontaneously and reactively, through to the picture’s progress. There are supernatural flashes of color and scars, which contribute to a holistic illusion of space that creates wonder and mystery for the viewer.
Taking these influences into consideration, one can store the information subconsciously and attend to the pure joy of seeing the work. Forge once compared the amount of time spent creating art to the amount of time that should be spent looking. In all, the intrigue is overpowering, drawing the viewer in for a very intimate look at the surface and then to further see the process, the layers and textures. Even after doing so at great length, there are still many questions about technique and context. This prompts the viewer to explore beyond mere visual response, and perhaps respond to that nagging gut instinct. It can be interpreted and described in a myriad of ways.
Works Cited
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