JUICY PAINT

Tuesday, December 22, 2009 through Sunday, June 6, 2010

From buttery brushstrokes to massive, sculptural build-ups of surfaces, many contemporary artists-like the Impressionists and Fauves before them-let the paint tell the story. Painters have long been inspired by the rich, visceral qualities of paint; its texture, its color, its sumptuousness. Drawn from the Museum's own holdings, Juicy Paint explores the many ways in which artists have explored and exploited the sheer physicality and dimensional effects of paint since the 1950s. Highlights include works by Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, James Hayward, Paul Jenkins, Karl Kasten, Jeffrey Keith, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Sam Tchakalian and Phe Ruiz.

WAYNE THIEBAUD:
SEVENTY YEARS OF PAINTING

Tuesday, February 16, 2010 through Saturday, July 3, 2010

Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting is a survey of this major American painter’s work. In addition to Thiebaud’s popular paintings and works on paper, the exhibition features both his most recent and his earliest work and thus reveals the full spectrum of his career. More than a third of the paintings were done after his last retrospective in 2000: included as well are prodigal paintings Thiebaud made as a young student. Curator Gene Cooper will highlight the artist’s “beach painting,” a subject that has become increasingly important to Thiebaud of late.

LEO VILLAREAL

Saturday, August 21, 2010 through Sunday, January 9, 2011

Leo Villareal is the most prominent light sculptor of his generation. In 1997, he abandoned his work with interactive television and began creating sculptures in which he combined strobe lights, neon, and most recently, LED bulbs activated by the artist’s own custom-made software. The magic of Villareal’s work lies in his sequencing. Thousands of tiny white LEDs may resemble a starry night as seen in a planetarium, while tubes of colored LEDs masked by a diffuser are like a Monet painting of water lilies set in motion. His hypnotic and exhilarating light sculptures will be appreciated by both the young and old, experienced and inexperienced art viewers, students of both the arts and sciences, and engineers who will be tempted to analyze the artist’s algorithms. This is the first museum survey of the groundbreaking work of Villareal, whose stunning manipulations of light and color are internationally renowned.