Budd Hopkins
Mahler's Castle II by Budd Hopkins
1972

About the Item

Budd Hopkin's Mahler's Castle paintings exemplified a shift away from his holistic single image paintings of 1971 and 1972 to a new hieraticism. Both Mondrian and Newman, for instance, were masters at building scale referents into their paintings too. Frank Stella and many of the other post-painterly abstractionists tended to ignore this essential pictorial element and to rely on size alone to convey a sensation of monumentality. Hopkins' formal vocabulary covers a complete range from huge planes on down to tiny dots and lines within the freely brushed areas. The small bounded places of minutely nuanced painterliness provide keys to the scale of all the other elements in his paintings, as well as to their colors, velocities and directions. They are in resolutely calligraphic and organic contrast to the geometric rigidity surrounding them and seem to break the smooth continuity of his surfaces. By doing so they deliver a symbolic message which is an essential part of Hopkins' dualistic attitude. They say something about the existence of the unexpected, irrational, and infinite within life's most clearly ordered and con trolled systems. Hopkins' paintings contain both color and black and white, hard edges and soft. His work is warm and cool, open and closed, solid and transparent, complete and open ended-all at once. Each painting is a contained world unto itself, while it implies infinite extensibility and is, in a very human way, contradictory, ambiguous, and deeply complex. From the 2017 PAAM exhibition catalog "Budd Hopkins - Full Circle". Mahler's Castle II includes a centralizing circle of pink, green and white, along with the triangular (and rectangular) hard-edge elements which were often found in Hopkins' earlier works. In just a few spots there are very these very organic, abstract spaces which contrast beautifully with the rest of the piece. Measuring 36" x 50", and signed "Hopkins '72" in the lower right. This work is also inscribed verso with the title "Mahler's Castle II" on the stretcher. "The dualistic attitude which informs Hopkins' work stems primarily from a dichotomy he experienced early in his career. When he came to New York in 1953 from Wheeling, West Virginia via Oberlin College, it was the high-time of Abstract Expressionism. For that movement's heroes–De Kooning, Kline, Pollack and Rothko–generalized public acceptance was just beginning, and their audience was still primarily confined to friends and colleagues. Hopkins felt closest to Kline and Rothko and they had the strongest influence on his work. Their impact on him and the excitement of the whole Abstract Expressionist pioneering ambience was only mitigated by his unwavering admiration for the kind of geometric abstraction epitomized by Mondrian, and the expressive color of Matisse–both of which he found lacking to some extend in the art then being produced." –April Kingsley from her introduction to the Budd Hopkins Retrospective.

Creator:

Budd Hopkins (1931 - 2011, American)

Creation Year:

1972

Dimensions:

Height: 36 in (91.44 cm)Width: 50 in (127 cm)

Medium:

Canvas,Acrylic

Movement & Style:

Abstract Expressionist

Period:

1970-1979