Electric Op, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, 2024 - 2025
Moirage, 1967 16mm film and Digital transfer, color, sound Realized with Gerald Oster Soundtrack: Paul Motian 9:21 min. Edition of 6 plus II AP
In the mid-1960s, a new movement called “Op” (short for “Optical”) art took the world by storm. These dizzying, dazzling artworks embodied the energy of the emerging Space Age: Op painters used electric colors and machine-like precision to make geometric patterns that seem to vibrate or move, while Op sculptors utilized new, futuristic materials such as Plexiglas and aluminum. Some created mechanical and electronic sculptures that actually do move, including many that use kinetic light. As art critic John Canaday wrote in 1965, Op artworks are “the only objects being created today, as art, that can compete with launching pads and industrial machinery as expressions of the character unique to our civilization.”
Electric Op is the first major exhibition to examine how the Op art of the 1960s and 1970s related to not only industrial machinery, but also the new electronic media of the dawning post-industrial era. At the very moment that Op artists began making works that short-circuit our optical systems, new video and digital technologies began reformatting the nature of images and how we see. Could it be more than coincidental that the undulating lines of Op art resemble electronic video signals, or that its grids suggest the pixilated structure of digital screens? In fact, many Op artists would turn to using these technologies, some as early as the late 1960s, while at the same time, many of the first video and digital artists openly turned to Op art for inspiration. In this way, Op art became more than just the final chapter of modernist geometric abstraction; it was also the first artistic movement of the global Information Age, heralding the transformation of vision from a mode of embodied perception to an algorithmic process executed by the computer systems that produce and process images today.
This exhibition is curated by former Buffalo AKG Art Museum Curator Tina Rivers Ryan and is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and the Musée d'arts de Nantes, where it will be on view from April 4 to September 1, 2025.