Like any good art, the more you look at it the more you see.
This is the case with this show. At first glance I found these pieces visually stimulating in size and color but that's about it! So I walked quickly past them eager to get to the wine and cheese.
Ok now back to the "ART". I walked past each piece trying really hard to see something. To get a grasp on anything recognizable. Am I the only person that does this? I know it's abstract art but I always try to find "something".
Anyways, we walked through the whole exhibition downstairs and I could swear that if I squint I see an image but can not make out what it is. So we wonder upstairs and start to walk through all these pieces... Hey! I think I see something! It looks like a tree. I'm probably making it up. So I step farther from the painting and squint harder... Yup! It's a landscape. So excited to have figured this out. Makes me feel like I know art! At least today I did.
Well there was so much more to these pieces then meets the eye. If you get really close up on these paintings you see pretty close to digital perfection in them. Figures! These are all done digitally which takes away from how complicated they seem. They are photographic images made up of dots. Very pixel-like. Then on top of that there are brush strokes... Completely random.
Then we go downstairs again to have a third look at what I was squinting at. Still can't see a recognizable image. So I take out my iphone to take a photo and there it is! The distance the camera makes to the painting makes it suddenly, surprisingly, and delightfully recognizable! It's a figure of a naked woman. I feel so excited to make this discovery. So excited in fact that I walk around showing strangers the image in my iphone. They are excited too.
We later have a speaker that talks a little bit about Koon's work. It turns out that all of these pieces are painstakingly hand done. NOT DIGITAL. It seems impossible. There are numerous circles with layered colors. And the brush strokes. These look so randomly drawn on top of the dots. But they aren't. If it makes any sense at all, they are paintings of brush strokes... not actual brush strokes. And just to make it even more ridiculously painstaking, none of the paint is ever overlapped. This means that something that looks so random had to be carbon copied in painting it. Does this make any sense?
You just have to go and see it yourself. Stand real close and see the layering, or "unlayering" of the paint. It creates so much depth. Then stand back and see it become an image.
You can see his inspiration in Lichtenstein... dots duh! And then you also see images of the past... some of the brush strokes resemble the Venus of Willendorf. A complete abstraction of it but still so recognizable.
This man is a genius!!! No joke!
For 2-3 million you can own one.
I was sold! I'll take two.
