Cream of the Crop: Exceptional Modern Art Collection at Ronald H. Silverman Gallery

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Color, color, color. Shape, shape, shape – the glorious combination of vivid palette and extraordinary geometric precision makes Back to Basics: Contemporary Art from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation now at Cal State LA’s Ronald H. Silverman Gallery exceptional viewing. The show features more than 50 artworks, created between 1947 and 2023. The timespan covers a wide range of work that explores a variety of mediums and techniques.

Curated by Billie Milam Weisman, the artists on exhibit collectively and individually pack a powerful punch. You’ll recognize many of the names:  Jason Adkins, Josef Albers, Saradell Ard, Tim Bavington, Charles Biederman, Isaac Brest, Casper Brindle, Tom Burr, S. Byrne, Ronald Davis, Tim Ebner, Ned Evans, Paul Gadegaard, Betty Gold, Daniel Jackson, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, Ellsworth Kelly, Melissa Kretschmer, Sol Lewitt, Vladimir Llaguno, Joe Lloyd, Pard Morrison, Andy Moses, Kenneth Noland, John Pearson, Brian Porray, Kevin Reinhardt, Michael Rey, Dorothea Rockburne, David Ryan, Robert Schaberl, Arthur Silverman, Frank Stella, Gary Stephan, Jeremy Thomas, and Victor Vasarely.

 

The show’s vibrancy percolates from the moment the viewer enters the gallery space, presenting stellar examples of works that range from the minimalist to the conceptual. Overall, one word comes to mind to describe the exhibition: radiant. The works emanate light, they pull, revel, and reveal in it. Some works are layered, others deceptively simple. The emphasis throughout is on geometric constructs such as circles, squares, lines, spheres, angles. Color jumps from the art, whether created in eye-popping primary shades or lush jeweled patinas. The works dance with light and change upon approach – viewed in extreme close up, the images differ in appearance from a longer-range view due to the way in which their geometric patterns shape how the eye perceives each work.

Anish Kapoor’s astonishing, ruby rose red “Blood Mirror III” is an intensely reflective example of the use of both light and color. The circular bowl-like mirrored surface contains reflective meaning within meaning and serves as a beautiful example of a work’s appearance altering based on the viewer’s proximity to it.

Jeremy Thomas’s “Iseki Yellow” is an indefinable layered shape, a flower, a collection of sun bubbles, a collection of cells about to take shape and metamorphosize. Both works exude their singular color as if it were a halo around the piece.

 

Joe Lloyd’s “Incline” is a very different work, a large-scale canvas with a varied color palette that traverses a literal and figurative ascent of light and shadow in angles bisected by colors from a dominant rich gold to a sky blue and violet. It is both structure and stairwell, handrails leading to a rooftop or along a path to a mountain peak. Each level is both platform and angle.

A more diminutive work, Pard Morrison’s “So Nice to Be Here With You,” packs a multi-colored series of striped lines into a rectangular canvas, color gradients that draw the eye forward and back with their precision and shifts.

Ned Evans’ color field painting “Got Red” is a large work that stripes a range of oranges, reds, golds, and yellows vertically across the vast canvas, colors that resemble the shades of a burnished summer sunset. Cooler shades prevail in the blues and aquas of Evans’ “Quarter,” which uses a variety of square and rectangular shapes within one canvas to create a lush vision of shadow and light that at once resemble the shape of buildings, the patterns on ocean waves, and leaf shadows in a forest. It is a quietly poetic vision.

While some works are simply beautiful to look at, others contain a visual experiment.

Such is the case with Josef Albers’ “Homage to the Square: Upon Arrival,”  in which three squares are utilized to reveal the subjectivity of color.  Painted using varied light conditions, Albers’ work is both art and alchemy, as it tests the way in which the alignment of different colors side by side create different visual experiences.

Beautifully curated with color the dominant criteria for grouping in each gallery space, the exhibit fully reveals the absolute poetry in the geometric form, the passion of color, and the compelling visual spectrum that makes up the way in which artists – and all humans – view the world.

As multi-faceted as a diamond, the works in Back to Basics dazzle. The closing reception takes place on Saturday,  July 27 from 12 – 5 p.m. The gallery is open 12-5 Monday-Friday only. It is located on the campus of California State University Los Angeles.

  • Genie Davis; exhibition images provided by LA Art Documents; additional opening day images by Genie Davis

Dive In

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Where the blue waters caress and also hold secrets, where the plants swim and sway, where secrets lie deep, both angels and demons may sleep…this is the sort of visual poetry C. Fodoreanu’s Ode to the Lake Sacalaia holds in its depths. If the lake inspires the artist’s creations, so does his creation inspire such visions in others.

An ancient Roman town lies on the deep silty bottom of this unsually deep freshwater lake in Romanian Transylvania.  Also resting there are the bones of divers who went in search of that almost mythical place and did not come back to the surface. And surely drifting there, too, are the remains of Fodoreanu’s childhood, his history, his dreams, and the circles and eddys of the artist’s self-discovery and promise.

There are photographs, some old and appropriately slightly watermarked; some large and bright in royal and midnight blues. Pedestal towers, with tree like markings, stand in a darkened back gallery. Each contains images of trees and water illuminated within viewing portholes. Behind this forest of pedestals, a projected image of branches and shoreline dances on the wall. On the ground are rune-like markings, vestages of a more distant past.

Projected images of water lap in an intimate deep blue on another such pedestal, a low bench allows the viewer to sit and contemplate the rhythm of the water, and resist the compulsion to dive in. Across the gallery, wavering cloth sheets hang from the ceiling, a circular spinning dance evoking the ripples on water.

Some of the photographic images are haunting, ephermeral, shadows of disconnected limbs and torsos in a gauzy film of sepia light. Others, are taken “From Far Away” and hung, pigment on rag, mounted on board, a landscape series seemingly taken from space, from the outer reaches of time. Then there is the large scale, board mounted pigment on rag image titled “Stars” which dances with blue on blue light.

A poem by the artist leads into the last gallery, dimly lit, and hung with large-scale blue images of diving and water so liquidly depicted that once again, the viewer wants to find that water and dive on in.  “We are the same, me and you, you and me…” Fodoreanu’s poem reads… and if we are the same, can we swim together in these crystaline yet dark depths?

For a little while, we can imagine that we do.

Ode to the Lake Sacalaia is at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery at CSULA through August 30th. A walk through by the artist will take place that day. Don’t forget to join in and take a dip.

  • Genie Davis, photos by Genie Davis

Unforgettable: Jonas Kulikauskas at Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery

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Powerful, poignant, and riveting, Jonas Kulikauskas’ I Often Forget, takes viewers through a heartbreaking and profound photographic exploration of the passage of time and of human relationships to it.

As curated by gallery director Mika Cho at Cal State LA’s Ronald H. Silverman, the work here absorbs and compels the viewer to enter an unfolding world both past and present, rendering those viewing it both accountable and stricken.

Together, Kulikauskas and Cho have assembled a deeply felt exhibition of both a photographic depiction of what was once the Vilnius Ghetto and a series of statements culled from the World War II-era that match their present-day settings, now modernized and/or hidden.

Along with the photographs and written history, there is a beautiful, fragile installation with white stones on the floor representing the loss of Jewish lives during the Holocaust, with a gauzy curtain obscuring a haunting image of the woods where some Vilnius Jewish ghetto inhabitants were hauled off and summarily executed. In another part of the gallery, a slide show unfolds, revealing many of the exhibition’s images projected in a subdued, hushed alcove.

Some photographs are displayed laid out on the trays of sifters used as construction implements, another reminder of how today’s modern city is built on the bones of the past. Others are presented in folders on white pedestals and in files hung on the walls around the gallery space, allowing multiple viewers to study the photographs and the stories that accompany them.

In approach, this is a photographic exploration of the present layered upon the untold grief of the past. Kulikauskas used an 8×10” camera equipped with a World War II-period lens to capture life today in the former ghetto. Inspired by his Lithuanian heritage, the artist used his participation in the Fulbright Program and the additional support of the Puffin Foundation to travel to Lithuania, taking photographs and researching the traumatic history of the community.

His work is especially pertinent today with the disquieting rise of antisemitism and the horror of Holocaust deniers. He undertook his journey in 2021, and has, with the help of archeologist Dr. Jon Seligman, historian Dr. Saulius Sužiedelis, the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History, and the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery, created a masterful exhibition worthy of reflection.

The passion of the artist’s commitment to his project can be felt in the bones of viewers, as he tells the brave, terrifying, and devastating researched stories of what happened when Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital and once called the “Jerusalem of the North,” was desecrated by the Nazi regime, its people effectively annihilated. Nearly a third of all residents were Jewish; 90% perished during the Holocaust.

This dark history has been largely hidden since that time. It has been literally built over physically in Vilnius, and few speak of that time. Even Kulikauskas’ parents did not speak of it, although they fled from Lithuania to Southern California, still speaking Lithuanian at home. The artist and his siblings attending a Lithuanian Catholic School on weekends, learning Lithuanian history and folk music but nothing about the massacre of the Jewish people in Vilnius.

While the Nazis were discussed, the Holocaust itself was not, something Kulikauskas, and now his son, who also attended the same cultural enrichment school, found deeply disturbing. This masterful exhibition is in great part a response to that lack of information.

In 2021, as a Fullbright scholar arriving in Vilnius to study the remaining Jewish Litvak community, Kulikauskas walked the streets of the ghetto. His guidebook, so to speak, was the historical diaries and testimonies about the life over 40,000 Lithuanian Jews led when trapped in the ghetto. Most were murdered by 1943.

Without Kulikauskas’ efforts, many of their words and experiences were well on their way to becoming lost. His photographs, despite their historic look, depict the present that has been busily swallowing these stories whole, subsumed behind shops and cafes and buildings now renovated into charming residences and tourist draws.

But in Kulikauskas’ work, the buried history of the Litvaks has been resurrected. And it is a stunning one. On September 6, 1941, the German and Lithuanian police began the roundup of the Jews of Vilnius into two quarters, separated by Vokiečių Street. A month later, the Nazis and Nazi collaborators had massacred most of the residents in the smaller of the two areas. According to Herman Kruk, who chronicled this period, 29,000 Jews were forced into the Vilna Ghetto which has previously housed just under 4,000 residents.

Ghetto inmates were forced to work for the Reich, and their lives were those of bare subsistence, while still fighting to preserve a meaningful life in the face of constant terror. Despite it all, they maintained a theater and a well-circulated library, while still taking part in both passive and active resistance to the Nazi regime. But before the war’s end, most were killed by their captors.

Kulikauskas’ work has not only exhumed their nearly forgotten memories, through it he has also offered a chance to memorialize their courage, their suffering, their hopes and dreams. It is no small feat, and I Often Forget not only provides an extraordinary exploration of this horrifying time in Lithuanian history, but does so with beautifully rendered images, deeply moving quotes and references, and with an eye on the future. He has preserved a grim, utterly horrible time and elevated the sacrifices, struggles, and meaning behind so many precious, lost lives.

Above, curator and gallery director Mika Cho

Both artistically and emotionally resonant, this is an exhibition that aches with longing, sorrow, and dread, and simply must be experienced.

The show ran at CSULA May 30 – July 7, 2023. Kulikauskas intends to travel the exhibition to other venues, and indeed, it deserves to be seen, felt, and experienced widely. There is a closing artist’s talk on Friday July 7th. If you can make it, please go.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis and provided by CSULA