Abstract circles in Yellow and Blue

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Budd Hopkins
Abstract circles in Yellow and Blue
1971

About the Item

One of the leading proponents of the "hard-edge" abstract minimalist school of painting in the 1950s and 1960s, Budd Hopkins (born 1931) created works that show the strong influence of Jackson Pollock and other leading painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Hopkins' paintings are now in numerous major collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Hirshhorn Collection in Washington, DC. Recently, he has also been recognized for his research into the matter of UFOs and one of his books, "The Intruders", printed by Random House, was on the New York Times best-seller list and was the basis for a television show on CBS. Born in 1931, he is a graduate of Linsly Military Institute (now Linsly School) in 1949 and Oberlin College in 1953. He first displayed artistic abilities when, as a child recovering from a long-term illness, he began to create sculptures of ships made out of modeling clay. But it wasn't until he arrive at Oberlin that he made a serious study of art. He settled in New York after obtaining his degree and has had a residence there ever since. He and his wife, April Kingsley, and their daughter, Grace, divide their time between their home at Cape Cod, Mass., and that in New York City. In his work, he travels widely. He has exhibited in England, Finland, Italy and Switzerland. In 1963, Hopkins was selected by the Columbia Broadcasting System as one of the 15 painters featured in the network's first television special on American art. In 1958, Art News picked him as one of 12 Americans for exhibition in Spoleto, Italy, in the "Festival of Two Worlds." His brilliance has won him a humber of fellowships and awards. In 1972, the West Virginia Arts and Humanities Council awarded him its Commission Prize. In 1976, he received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting and in '79 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. He also won a special project grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1982. His art has been featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Bronx Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum, Corcoran Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, Queens Museum in New York, and the Public Library of New York. Across the United States, it has been seen in the Smithsonian Institution and the Library Congress in Washington, D. C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the San Francisco Museum, among others. Universities and Colleges which have shown Hopkins paintings and sculpture include his alma mater, Oberlin; Princeton, Yale, Denison, Drew, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, DePauw, Williams, Brandeis, Middlebury, North Carolina, Michigan State, Reed, Bradford, Connecticut, Alabama, Bennington, and the City College of New York,

Creator:
Budd Hopkins (1931 - 2011, American)
Creation Year:
1971
Dimensions:
Height: 29 in (73.66 cm)Width: 22 in (55.88 cm)
More Editions & Sizes:
Edition 1 / 90
Movement & Style:
Abstract Expressionist
Period:
1970-1979
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Surfside, FL
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU382679632

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Budd Hopkins' paintings in the 1960s combined the precise, hard-edge geometric shapes he was enthralled with and drawn to as a child with gestural, atmospheric painting characteristic of second- and later-generation Abstract Expressionists. "I had come to understand that an abstract painting at its most powerful was a kind of aesthetic scrim behind which lurks a concealed, obsessive 'thing' or image of some kind, transformed, made palatable by the artist's mediating skills." Hopkins viewed collage as an artistic technique and a philosophical, aesthetic means of unifying a disjointed and fragmented world. He saw collage, the assemblage of fragments and varying points of view, in the poetry, painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and, especially, motion pictures of his day: "Consciously or unconsciously, contemporary artists work to create harmony from distinctly jarring material, forcing warring ideas, materials and spatial systems into a tense and perhaps arbitrary detente. Seen most broadly, the presence of the collage aesthetic is the sole defining quality of modernism in all the arts." Hopkins worked to achieve harmony, clarity and precision while maintaining a sense of mystery: "I like neither extreme in art wholeheartedly, neither the purified world of geometrical art nor the free, indulgent world of Expressionism." In 1963, Hopkins' work was included in American Painters, a film documentary of American artists and styles with commentary from Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, Thomas Hess of Art News Magazine, Sidney Janis, gallery director, and Harold Rosenberg, art critic. Later, Hopkins included abstracted figures in his sculptural pieces. While moving away from Abstract Expressionism, Hopkins retained in his work the use of intense colors and hard-edged forms. His works of the 1980s, including Temples and Guardians, featured these "sentinals" who were, according to Hopkins, "participating in a frozen ritual, fixed – absolutely – within a privileged space…" Though Hopkins denied any connection, some critics viewed these ritualistic pieces as an extension of Hopkins' fascination with alien beings. Hopkins viewed his sculpted guardians not as human per se, but as magical, fierce, noble robots of the unconscious. Hopkins exhibited his paintings and sculptures in museums, galleries such as Andre Zarre, Levis Fine Art and Poindexter (New York) and Jan Cicero (Chicago), and universities throughout the United States. Hopkins had a major retrospective exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in the summer of 2017. The Whitney Museum, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the British Museum, include Hopkins' work in their permanent collections.