Handwerker Gallery Newsletter
Spring 2000 – Volume 2, Number 1
From the Permanent Collection
 Richard
Anuszkiewicz is an American painter, born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1930.
His work is representative of the op art movement. "Op art" (analogous
to the term "pop art") is an abbreviation of "optical art." It was loosely
used in the '60s to refer to a class of geometrical abstraction that exploits
perceptual ambiguities and other marginal optical devices in order to
shock and disrupt vision, causing the work to seem to vibrate, pulsate,
or flicker and sometimes creating a hallucinatory appearance of movement.
The purpose of optical art is to activate vision by imparting the strongest
possible retinal experiences, which is done by exploiting visual ambiguities,
so that as the visual system is fatigued the eye fluctuates in an attempt
to evoke and maintain a consistent image. For that purpose, op artists
elaborated on the well-known visual illusions from the standard textbooks
on perceptual psychology. This exploitation of scientific principles in
artistic creation was perceived to be an ultimate expression of the modernist
ideology and as such was harshly critiqued by a group of the New York–based
"neo-geo" artists in the '80s.
Richard Anuszkiewicz's Spectral Cadmium, which will be
on display in the Handwerker Gallery's Permanent Collection Showcase,
fully inscribes the op art logic. We invite your thoughts and comments
on this dazzling encounter between art and science.
|
