Shadow & Space

Two new exhibitions are on view at Orange Door, Chicago. Shadow & Space brings together painting and sculpture from the Foundation’s collection in which artists use unconventional materials to find new forms. Inspired by the Light & Space movement of Southern California in the 1960s, the exhibition dovetails on that genre’s innovative use of lighting effects for the purpose of producing optically sensitive content. For the artists in this exhibition, atmospheric phenomena such as ambient light, shadow, translucent plastic, reflected color, as well as industrial materials like nails and moving parts, were used to evolve the expressive range of abstraction.

Because they worked with non-traditional art-making materials and methods, often for the first time, the artists in this exhibition acted as engineers in order to achieve their desired effects. Peter Alexander, for instance, was among the first to cast plastic, and for Frank Stella, Anne Truitt and Manfred Mohr, shaped canvas paintings required the mathematical skills of carpentry as well as the aesthetic dimension of being an artist. The results are precise, light-responsive and liberated structures achieved through inventive systems and processes.

Also on view is Life After Media, a micro-exhibition of six contemporary digital artworks from the Foundation’s collection, which reveals what happens to obsolete, aging or antiquated communications technologies after artists resuscitate them. The artworks propose that creative interventions in mass media such as the internet, film, television and music recordings can emulate the power structures of mass-media communications, but also their ephemerality. The exhibition features work by Guillermo Galido, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Eduardo Kac, Matthew Kluber, Jon Rafman and Jason Salavon from the Thoma Foundation collection.

Both exhibitions are on view at Orange Door through Summer 2017. Hours by appointment.