ART-PRESENTATION: Helen Pashgian-New Lenses and Spheres
Born in 1934, Helen Pashgian is a pioneer and pre-eminent member of the California Light and Space Movement. Her signature forms include columns, discs and spheres in delicate and rich coloration, often with an isolated element suspended, embedded or encased within. Pashgian’s innovative application of industrial epoxies, plastics and resins effect semi-translucent surfaces that simultaneously filter and contain illumination. Activated by light, these sculptures resonate in form and spatiality, both inner and outer.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Vito Schnabel Gallery Archive
Helen Pashgian presents “New Lenses and Spheres”, her first solo exhibition in Switzerland at Vito Schnabel Gallery. The exhibition presents 8t new sculptures, extending Pashgian’s exploration of her earliest forms (her signature discs and spheres) and revealing the artist at the height of her technical prowess as a true innovator in the development of the industrial plastic arts. For decades, Pashgian has harnessed the possibilities of plastic and its malleability to expand visual and physical fields of perception. Employing color as her primary sculpting element through the use of cast resin and acrylic, her work suspends, traps, and reflects light within pure form. Her lifelong fascination with light’s intangible character has led her to pursue its palpable poetics. Born in Pasadena, California, Helen Pashgian emerged on the Los Angeles art scene in the late 1960s upon returning from Boston, where she trained as an art historian. While Pashgian began her career making paintings, she quickly abandoned the canvas in favor of experimental materials, taking up cast polyester resin, a declassified military substance. Pashgian’s commitment to light as both the medium and message of her art was revived when she returned home and reconnected with the California Coast. Fueled by a nostalgia for the landscape she recalls the movement of the “ripples of light” that penetrated the water and danced on its surface. The 1960s comprised a decade of unparalleled technical innovation, and Pashgian was at the forefront, spearheading the advancement of a new artistic aesthetic. Along with other Los Angeles-based artists, including James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Mary Corse, Peter Alexander, Laddie John Dill, DeWain Valentine, and Hap Tivey, she enthusiastically embraced the high-tech aerospace materials that were being developed amidst the Cold War’s space race. Refined and seductive, they imitated the slick surfaces of surfboards and automobiles that defined the postwar landscape of Los Angeles, a place where the natural and manmade coexist uniquely. Pashgian developed a mode of working in her Pasadena studio, applying the theoretical discipline and analysis she acquired in her art historical training to the evolution of her art. She began crafting meticulously polished and complex objects on an intimate scale that employed a reductive vocabulary of simple geometric forms. Cast polyester resin was a captivating but unforgiving material that relied upon an exacting chemical process and the expertise of technical skill. Accepting a residency at Cal Tech from 1969 to 1970, she collaborated with Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineers and scientists to study the properties of light. There, she was also introduced to the technical fabricator Jack Brogan and his workshop in Venice, which provided an invaluable resource to Light and Space artists in their unwieldy engineered works that explored the stunning possibilities of the refraction and reflection of light. At Vito Schnabel Gallery Pashgian’s decades long explorations and innovations continue. In the artist’s “Untitled” (2018) lenses, light, color and form sublimely dissolve into one another, creating an apparition that appears to hover and pulsate in space. Luminous, palpable, and alluring, and nearly indistinguishable from the atmospheres they inhabit, the lenses are also a result of extraordinary human labor and painstaking precision. After Pashgian abandoned polyester resin for its extreme toxicity, she began to search for a new material that would yield similarly sensational optics. She experimented for years with different epoxies, testing these clear substances and assessing their stability. Here, employing cast epoxy resin, she has achieved an object that is thinner, more minimal, and highly refined than previously fabricated before. The exhibition also presents five new “Untitled” (2018) spheres. Modestly scaled at 16.5 cm in diameter, Pashgian’s latest spheres rest enigmatically atop tall white pedestals. Each contains a solid acrylic element that appears to float, suspended, within the object’s viscous internal volume. Within a smoke black orb, a clear acrylic shape whirls and churns, casting shadows and refracting light as it enters the vessel. In another multi-faceted sphere, Pashgian layers bands of color in yellow, white, blue, red, and pink. As the viewer’s position to the work shifts, so does the nature of the sphere. From one angle, colors change in saturation and hue as green emerges from layers of blue and yellow; from another, shapes appear and recede, the flat ribbons of color morphing and transforming into a spheric volume of its own within the larger sphere. Pashgian’s other spheres are cast in the primary colors of light: green, red, and blue. These works contain acrylic shapes such as pyramids, cones, and tubes. Evoking intrigue and movement, their mysterious internal complexity draws in the viewer through contemplation, slow looking, and wonder to perceive the beauty of light.
Info: Vito Schnabel Gallery, Via Maistra 37, St. Moritz, Duration 16/7-31/8/19, Days & Hours: Daily 14:00-19:00 (23/7-4/8), Tue-Sat 14:00-19:00 5-31/8), www.vitoschnabel.com
