Ladies of Summary Expressionism, an exhibition of work and drawings curated from the Rita Blitt Legacy Assortment offered alongside works by Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell, is on view on the Mulvane Artwork Museum in Topeka, Kansas, by February 2025. That includes 5 artists working at completely different occasions and locations, the present goals to supply a glimpse into the universality of an artwork motion because it unfolded the world over, revealing how these ladies navigated the dialect of Summary Expressionism.
A extra complicated historical past of Summary Expressionism is rising as artwork historians, curators, and students proceed to check it. Removed from New York Metropolis, artists accustomed to abstraction had been considering post-war political and social environments. Rita Blitt was one such artist working outdoors the mainstream who explored gesture in her studio follow.
Born in 1931 in Kansas Metropolis, Missouri, and presently dividing her time between Kansas Metropolis and San Francisco, California, Blitt has been a working towards artist for greater than seven a long time. Working throughout a wide range of disciplines, together with portray, drawing, and sculpture, her artwork is impressed by the emotional stimuli she experiences from music, dance, poetry, and nature. She interprets these cerebral experiences into type with sweeping gestural strains, explosions of daring shade, zen-like calligraphic shapes in black floating in white areas, and smooth clouds of mild pastel circles. Sinuous, usually swirling strains encourage her sculptures fabricated into metal towering above the panorama, whereas others, rendered in resin, dance above us in inside areas.
Blitt can also be a filmmaker and has produced six quick documentaries of her work between 1976 and 2011. The award-winning “Caught in Paint” (2003), created in collaboration with choreographer David Parsons and photographer Lois Greenfield, is among the best-known of her movie shorts and has been featured in 130 movie festivals. Martin Sherwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as “Abyss of Time,” her 2013 movie with composer Michael Udow, “An expertise akin to drifting by MoMA on a cloud of mesmerizing music.”
Artwork by Rita Blitt belongs to the everlasting assortment of a number of museums and establishments, such because the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Artwork, the Nationwide Museum of Singapore, the Skirball Cultural Heart, the Nevada Museum of Artwork, the John F. Kennedy Library, and the Kemper Museum of Up to date Artwork. In 2017, she established the Rita Blitt Legacy Assortment with a donation of over 2,000 works on paper, work, and sculptures to the Mulvane Artwork Museum at Washburn College. Altogether, this assortment charts the iterative technique of her exploration of shade, mild, and motion by sculptures, work, and video work created over 50 years.
To study extra, go to ritablitt.com.
