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Optical Transformation

Image Coming Soon

Optical Transformation

ca. 1942

Gyorgy Kepes

American, 1906-2002

Gyorgy Kepes studied art in Budapest before moving to Berlin in 1930, where he collaborated closely with László Moholy-Nagy on film, theater, and design projects, an association that continued after Kepes joined his colleague at the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. His experiments with light, reflections, and abstract forms defined his teaching career-twenty years at M.I.T., then as founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1967.

The earliest of Kepes' works shown here, Hieroglyphic Body from 1936, reveals his fascination with hieroglyphic forms, which were inspired by Apollinaire's ideograms and Miró's painting-poems, similar in concept to the photograms that he created in Budapest-essentially abstract images made without a camera by placing miscellaneous objects, including magnets, on photographic paper and exposing them to light. In Kepes' hands, these attain a lyrical quality, and a gestural freedom associated with the automatic writings of the Surrealists and the expressive brushwork of contemporary abstract expressionists.
Gelatin silver print
The Graham Nash Collection
81.60.10
location
Not currently on view

Resources

Exhibition HistorySeattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, "Order and Border", February 26, 2010 - August 28, 2011

Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, "International Abstraction: Making Painting Real", May 2, 2003 - February 29, 2004

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