Victor Vasarely

Planetary Folklore Participations No. 1

1969

This is a revolving colorful kiddush cup with a signed and numbered Agam op art print in it. this includes the base tray. There is no cup insert so it is more of a sculptural piece ...

Yaacov Agam Israeli (b. 1928) Hand signed, not individually numbered but from edition of 180. I can include a copy of the title sheet with the edition size and his signature if you request. sheet: 13.5 X 13.5 inches Some of these works have beautiful Hebrew calligraphy and mod imagery, animals, children and such that are not usually found in his work. This is a masterpiece of bold, graphic, mod design. Along with Reuven Rubin and Menashe Kadishman he is among Israel's best known artists internationally. Biographical info: The son of a rabbi, Yaacov Agam can trace his ancestry back six generations to the founder of the Chabad movement in Judaism. in 1946, he entered the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Studying with Mordecai Ardon, a former student at the Weimar Bauhaus. Yaakov Agam has been associated h with “abstract” artists, “hard edge” artists, and artists such as Josef Albers and Max Bill. Others find in Agam’s work an indebtedness to the masters of the Bauhaus. Agam’s approach to art, being conceptual in nature, has been likened to Marcel Duchamp’s, who expressed the need to put art “at the service of the spirit.” And, because of Agam’s employment of color and motion in his art, he has been compared to Alexander Calder, the artist who put sculpture into motion. (Motion is not an end, but a means for Agam. Calder’s mobiles are structures that are fixed, revolving at the whim of the wind. In a work by Agam, the viewer must intervene.) Agam has also been classified as an “op art” artist because he excels in playing with our visual sensitivities. Agam went to Zurich to study with Johannes Itten at the Kunstgewerbeschule. There, he met Frank Lloyd Wright and Siegfried Giedion, whose ideas on the element of time in art and architecture impressed him. In 1955, Galerie Denise René hosted a major group exhibition in connection with Vasarely's painting experiments with movement. in addition to art by Vasarely, it included works by Yaacov Agam, Pol Bury, Soto and Jean Tinguely, among others. Most Americans were first introduced to Vasarely by the groundbreaking exhibition, "The Responsive Eye," at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1965. Josef Albers, Richard Anuszkiewicz. The show confirmed Vasarely's international reputation as the father of Op art. Agam has sought to express his ideas in a non-static form of art. In his abstract Kinetic works, which range from paintings and graphics to sculptural installations and building facades. Agam continually seeks to explore new possibilities in form and color and to involve the viewer in all aspects of the artistic process. Thus, for the past 40 years, Yaacov Agam’s pioneering ideas have impacted developments in art, (painting, monoprint, lithograph and agamograph) architecture, theatre, and public sculpture. Reflecting both his Israeli Jewish...