Paintings act as an invitation to meditate
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Max Gimblett's "Everest -- for Andy Warhol" -
"Hopscotch" by Max Gimblett, part of "The Word of God" exhibit series at The Andy Warhol Museum.
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"Stand in front of [the painting] at its center, look at it for 15 minutes, and then enter."
Max Gimblett was suggesting the best way to experience fully one of three oversized paintings in "The Word of God: Max Gimblett's Sound of One Hand" at The Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side.
"The Princess Mnemosyne" is a churning field of roses and pinks -- and, by imaginative expansion, of flaming sunsets and shimmering blossoms and budding passion -- overlain with wide, bold sinuous swaths of silvered brush strokes. Formally, it's at first look abstract expressionist, but those brush swaths are calligraphic, reminiscent of Zen ink painting. And the longer one views it, the more depth is revealed.
The titles give clue to the complexity of the artist's reach. Mnemosyne is Greek goddess of memory and mother of the Muses. "Everest -- for Andy Warhol," the museum's muse, is a composition of blue hues cut with white. "Diogenes" -- a Greek philosopher known for his asceticism -- comprises curtains of white and gray and black, inner and outer spaces, the brushstrokes spectral, a fog-shrouded landscape both inviting and foreboding.
Once you've entered, "walk around in the three dimensions," Mr. Gimblett said. "Walk through [the surface marks] as though there was a space behind them. Painting is built on volume. Painting is inherently illusionistic."
After only 15 minutes?
"I was going to say 45," he responds with a hearty laugh. "I toned it down to 15."
Many artists may wish for visitors to make time to know a work of art in order to appreciate it fully, but Mr. Gimblett has even more claim to that request because his works may be placed alongside the spiritual traditions of Byzantine icon and Buddhist mandala.
He was born in 1935 in Auckland, New Zealand, to a family whose heritage was the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. "I loved the church as a boy. I was spiritual, religious. I married into a Jewish family. And I became a Buddhist."
Although Mr. Gimblett has achieved fame as an artist in New Zealand, he has made his home in Manhattan since 1972. In 2006, he took vows to become a Rinzai Buddhist lay monk.
In addition to the large paintings, the exhibition shows numerous colorful smaller paintings that sometimes reference specific contemporary Western artists -- Sigmar Polke, for example -- and spare black and white paintings of sumi ink on hand made paper.
First Published November 9, 2011 12:00 am
