Hans Hoffman at The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Combustible Wall

Hans Hofmann’s famous phrase “push and pull” is most often associated with his signature works of the 1950s and 1960s, in which bold color planes emerge from and recede into energetic surfaces of intersecting and overlapping shapes. The ideas and impulses behind this enduring term, however, took shape decades earlier, in his teachings, writings, and in his own paintings. In the late 1930s, in a series of widely attended lectures in Greenwich Village, Hofmann demonstrated how to “push a plane in the surface or to pull it from the surface” to create pictorial space. “We must create pictorial space,” he declared to audiences of avid young artists and critics, including Arshile Gorky, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg. Hofmann would later refine his definition of push and pull as “expanding and contracting forces . . . . the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received; thus action continues as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. Push answers with pull and pull with push.”

Magnum Opus

"Pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light."
Push and Pull: Hans Hofmann brings together signature paintings from BAMPFA’s distinguished collection of the artist’s work, such as Combinable Wall, I and II (1961) and Magnum Opus (1962). In 1963, at the height of his internationally acclaimed career, the artist donated nearly fifty paintings to UC Berkeley in recognition of the University’s important role in his early career. He first came to America from Germany in 1930 to teach in UC Berkeley’s Department of Art, at the invitation of Worth Ryder. From Berkeley, Hofmann went on to New York, where his established his famed and influential art schools. By the late 1940s Hofmann was  also recognized as a progressive, avant-garde painter and one of the originators of Abstract Expressionism. In 1958, at the age of seventy-eight, Hofmann closed his schools and returned to his studio full-time, for the first time in over forty years. In this last decade of his life, he produced an astounding body of energetic, masterful paintings. “My aim,” he stated in 1962, “is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.

August 31 - December 11, 2016

'Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible' opens at the Berkeley Art Museum

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents "Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible," the first museum retrospective of the eccentric outsider painter in more than twenty years. Organized by the Menil Collection in Houston, the Berkeley presentation features approximately forty of Bess’s works, dating from 1946 to 1970 with an installation of archival materials curated by American artist Robert Gober.
 More at:  http://www.examiner.com/article/forrest-bess-seeing-things-invisible

The Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archives 44th Annual MFA show

Student work but it's all very intriguing..http://www.examiner.com/article/the-berkeley-art-museum-and-film-archives-44th-annual-mfa-show

Bay Area art picks for the week of March 10

 Zachary Adams. Tiger Dance Party. Creativity Explored.

It's lions and tigers and bears (Oh my) at Creativity Explored, elephants at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA), paintings inspired by ancient Greece and Rome at the Italian Cultural Institute and an ongoing series of lectures and art demonstrations in honor of International Women's Week at the San Francisco Public Library.  The only thing the art viewer will need is good walking shoes and an extra dose of energy.
http://www.examiner.com/article/bay-area-art-picks-for-the-week-of-march-10

In Berkeley: "Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Painting," and "Deities, Demons, and Teachers of Tibet, Nepal, and India."

Reviews on the two shows at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive: "Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Painting," and "Deities, Demons, and Teachers of Tibet, Nepal, and India." 

http://www.examiner.com/article/beauty-revealed-images-of-women-qing-dynasty-painting