Steina and Woody Vasulka at Buffalo AKG Art Museum
September 9, 2024
September 9, 2024
Steina and Woody Vasulka's works are featured in a major upcoming exhibition at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, titled Electric Op.
The show is scheduled to open on Friday, September 27, 2024 and remain on view until Monday, January 27, 2025 and draws on the Buffalo AKG’s leading collection of Op art—established with the museum’s ground-breaking 1965 exhibition Art Today: Kinetic and Optic—Electric Op. It brings together over 100 artworks by nearly ninety artists to trace the six-decade history of the enduring relationship between Op art and electronic art and culture. Dynamic paintings, sculptures, and prints by international Op artists working in the 1960s and 1970s are placed into dialogue with analog videos and computer-generated prints and films of the same period, demonstrating how Op became “Electric.” The exhibition also includes more recent contemporary artworks from the 1980s onward that embody the sensibility of “Electric Op,” including paintings, sculptures of programmed lights, and even an interactive digital game. The exhibition concludes with a presentation of vintage ephemera and other cultural artifacts; together, these show how Op art even shaped what electronic technology looks like in our popular imagination.
Curated by Tina Rivers Ryan and co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and the Musée d'arts de Nantes, Electric Op is the first major exhibition to examine how the Op art of the 1960s and 1970s related to not only industrial machinery, but also the new electronic media of the dawning post-industrial era.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a large-format, bilingual (English/French) catalog published by Giles, featuring full-page illustrations of nearly a hundred sensational works, including many that are rarely seen or reproduced. It also includes a major overview essay by the exhibition’s curator; three newly commissioned essays on Op art, the relationship between art and science, and computer graphics by leading scholars of these topics; and an anthology of writings by artists in the exhibition that address the relationship between abstraction and technology. The exhibition will be on view at Musée d'arts de Nantes from April 4 to September 1, 2025.
Read more here.
The show is scheduled to open on Friday, September 27, 2024 and remain on view until Monday, January 27, 2025 and draws on the Buffalo AKG’s leading collection of Op art—established with the museum’s ground-breaking 1965 exhibition Art Today: Kinetic and Optic—Electric Op. It brings together over 100 artworks by nearly ninety artists to trace the six-decade history of the enduring relationship between Op art and electronic art and culture. Dynamic paintings, sculptures, and prints by international Op artists working in the 1960s and 1970s are placed into dialogue with analog videos and computer-generated prints and films of the same period, demonstrating how Op became “Electric.” The exhibition also includes more recent contemporary artworks from the 1980s onward that embody the sensibility of “Electric Op,” including paintings, sculptures of programmed lights, and even an interactive digital game. The exhibition concludes with a presentation of vintage ephemera and other cultural artifacts; together, these show how Op art even shaped what electronic technology looks like in our popular imagination.
Curated by Tina Rivers Ryan and co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and the Musée d'arts de Nantes, Electric Op is the first major exhibition to examine how the Op art of the 1960s and 1970s related to not only industrial machinery, but also the new electronic media of the dawning post-industrial era.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a large-format, bilingual (English/French) catalog published by Giles, featuring full-page illustrations of nearly a hundred sensational works, including many that are rarely seen or reproduced. It also includes a major overview essay by the exhibition’s curator; three newly commissioned essays on Op art, the relationship between art and science, and computer graphics by leading scholars of these topics; and an anthology of writings by artists in the exhibition that address the relationship between abstraction and technology. The exhibition will be on view at Musée d'arts de Nantes from April 4 to September 1, 2025.
Read more here.