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West! Frank Gehry and the Artists of Venice Beach, 1962-1978 features the work of sixteen artists whose work in Venice, California influenced the early development of Frank Gehry’s architectural career. The artists all worked in or around Venice Beach, California, between 1962, when Gehry opened his studio and 1978, when he completed his residence in Santa Monica and embarked on the more public, signature phase of his career. Often cited by Gehry himself as his supportive and inspirational community, these artists were working with themes and formal elements that pushed the boundaries of both sculpture and painting. Specifically, the Venice artists explored light, space, and the use of new, more industrial materials in their work-all elements of great importance in Gehry’s architecture.
In the 1960s, Venice California was a freethinking, low-rent district on the ocean that attracted artists and young radicals from across the nation. Frank Gehry opened his studio in nearby Santa Monica in 1962 in the midst of this budding artistic scene. Always slightly on the margin, the artists who gravitated there were experimental and a bit irreverent. The group that clustered around Gehry included Peter Alexander, John Altoon, Charles Arnoldi, Larry Bell, Tony Berlant, Billy Al Bengston, Vija Celmins, Ronald Davis, Guy Dill, Laddie John Dill, Robert Graham, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, and De Wain Valentine. Focused on blurring the boundaries between different media-such as painting and sculpture or sculpture and architecture-and playing with non-traditional materials-such as industrial metals, plastics, and junk-this community of artists provided the inspiration and support that Gehry was not able to garner from the local architectural establishment.
Gehry’s contact with the Venice Beach art scene inspired a sense of experimentation that would develop into a major component of his mature architectural voice. Most of the architectural work Gehry was working on in the years between 1962 and 1978 was commercial in nature. The restrictions of such work-strict production deadlines and tight budgets-did not allow for the play and experimentation that would eventually distinguish his trademark style. Gehry made a self-conscious choice at this point to work in the two veins simultaneously, taking on separate more creatively challenging projects such as the Hollywood studio/residence he designed for graphic designer Lou Danziger in 1964. Throughout these important formative years, Gehry also interacted freely with the Venice Beach artists in a number of ways ranging from simply frequenting their galleries to more direct interactions professionally and socially. In 1968, for instance, Gehry designed an exhibit space for Billy Al Bengston’s exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the Bengston show, Gehry played on the artist’s interest in LA motorcycle culture by inventing a radical space inside the conservative space of the museum itself.
The Weisman’s exhibition West! will feature the work of the loosely knit, but clearly related, group of artists who emerged on the scene in Venice California in the early 1960s and constituted the artistic community in which Frank Gehry matured and honed his now world-renowned style. The pieces in the exhibition represent examples of early work by the artists and serve to demonstrate the manner in which each artist broke new ground in the areas of materials, form, and the manner in which the viewer would interact with the artwork. Focused on experience itself, the seemingly simple works pushed boundaries and attempted to perplex viewers by questioning the nature of each viewer’s reality. Whether it be creating solid form from light as in the case of Irwin’s canvases and scrim pieces, or the creation of hyper-real illusionistic space as in the case of Celmin’s almost metaphysical drawings, each artist offered a new manner in which to consider the physical world and in so doing, inspired Gehry’s most physical and interactive of artistic practices-that of architecture. Gehry once described himself as a "child of the 60s" and this exhibition aspires not only to prove this, but also to expand our understanding of what that claim actually means. Deeply engaged with individual experience, the Venice Beach artists and Frank Gehry stand as explorers and innovators in an era and a place that often led the way into a new mind set about the way we can understand and live in the world.
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