Historical lineage and contemporary ingenuity inform Then & Now, an exhibition that serves as a bridge between epochs with works made from the early years of the 20th Century when artists found the freedom to manipulate geometric form. This break with making art based on observation also served as an antidote to the tumultuous socio-political milieu of the 1920s and 1930s. Characterized by skill sets based on radiometry, circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, lines, and chromatic cadence, inherently known forms transcend the bounds of representation.
Works in the exhibition date from Stanley William Hayter's 1930 painting on paper to James Kennedy's 2023 paintings on panels and mylar. Geometric abstraction serves as an aesthetic sanctuary and a vehicle of profound expression, generating new responses that perpetuated the vitality of the movement into the 21st Century, channeling the essence of these ways of working to Contemporary artistic sensibility.
In addition to the works by Hayter and Kennedy, the exhibition includes Anton Prinner, Terry Haass, Robert Blackburn, Odili Odita, Mavis Pusey, Dorothy Dehner, Margaret Balzer Cantieni, Harry Hoehn, E. B. Adam, Nina Negri, Alice Trumbull Mason, Judith Rothschild, Thomas Lias, Jean Morrison, John Paul Jones, Morris Blackburn, Harvey Quaytman, Sam Gilliam, Steven Ford, Christopher Hartshorne, Michel Tremblay, Takesada Matsutani, Shu Lin Chen, Hideo Honda, Nona Hershey, Amze Emmons, Nono Reinhold, David Shapiro, Ryan Parker, and Mary Lee Bendolph.
