|
Marko Spalatin Color Lithograph Poster Signed #7
Marko Spalatin - Seuferer Chosy Gallery - Madison, Wisconsin - Silkscreen print / poster. Signed and numbered in pencil. Numbered 7 of 16.
Measures 26 by 36 inches on thick poster board. Unfortunately, there is a three inch tear on the left center that goes into the color slightly.
Marko Spalatin was born in 1945 in Croatia and came to the US in 1963. He was a leading American Op artist of the 1970's era and beyond. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1968 and his Master of Fine Arts in 1971, both from the University of Wisconsin. By 1970, Marko Spalatin had become a major Op Art printmaker, along with such artists as Richard Anuszkiewicz and Vasarely. <> Briefly, Op Art is a type of abstract art that aims to exploit optical elements. Concerned with both the physical and psychological processes of vision, Op Art explored both illusion and reality through blocks or patterns of color.Since 1970, the art of Marko Spalatin has been included in major exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, Paris, Montreal and Beirut. Today examples of his fine prints will be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris, the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.Spalatin uses his own method of Serigraphy that ensures each print is rich, vibrant and clear. As he states,"I create my serigraphs using a particular silkscreen printing technique which I developed in the mid-1960s as an art student at the University of Wisconsin. This method allows for accurate editioning using floating stencils rather than permanent ones. Throughout a color run, the ink itself holds the stencil in position on the screen. Each color application involves two back-and-forth squeegee strokes of equal pressure in order to keep the stencil from shifting out of position."I use architectural tracing paper as the stencil (blocking material). With a single-edge razor blade and straight-edge tool, I carefully cut away the areas through which the ink will pass onto the printing paper. The tracing paper that remains acts as a resist on the screen. The color is printed on every sheet of paper in the entire edition, and each print is transferred to an adjacent drying rack. When the run is completed, I remove and discard the stencil, clean away the remaining oil-based ink from the screen with turpentine, and prepare for the next color. The process of cutting a stencil is repeated for each color, and each color requires a separate printing."It is critical that every color run is accurately registered against the previous one. (My serigraphs are composed of anywhere from 10 to 40 separate colors.) It is an exciting moment for me when the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle falls into place and the complete image is finally revealed."
The following is the Artist's Statement,"My work represents a continuous involvement with abstract geometric forms defined by careful manipulation of color and light. The relationship between form and color within the pictorial field demands a visually symbiotic presence. The challenge revolves around the selection of a form as a vehicle for color, as well as choosing appropriate color and light for that form. This interplay creates a primary spatial illusion, along with secondary effects. I find that precisely defined areas of color, when placed against each other, compete for dominance. This activity, when further accentuated by tonal structure, produces multiple levels of perception. A given area of uniformly applied pigment loses its flat character through simultaneous contrast with the surrounding colors. In many cases, the positive and negative spaces within the field become interchangeable. In more complex paintings, when the substructure is a series of repetitive modules, the color-light interplay reveals its polyphonic character.In general, my compositions remain formal and symmetrical in order to be set in motion by unexpected mutations of color and light. In some cases, the careful placement of small areas of saturated color against a backdrop of transitional grays creates an illusion of suspended particles. There is no doubt that in these images in particular, my sense of color and light is subconsciously influenced and sustained by many years of scuba diving in the waters of the Adriatic Sea and the Caribbean. I am intrigued by the relativity of color and by the mystery of light, and I am constantly challenged to explore their potentials. Every painting becomes a self-imposed visual problem, subjectively resolved in search of an objective truth."
|
Shopping Cart
Checkout