Influential printmaker has explored geometric, rhythmic forms over a 50-year career
I think I saw Garo Antreasian’s work for the first time in 1997, at a Cline LewAllen Gallery show, but it might have been a decade earlier, at another gallery or museum show. It could have been anywhere in the United States, actually. Antreasian, 86 and still making art, is quite the elder statesman of printmaking and has exhibited widely, and his works are in many museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was the first technical director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which opened in Los Angeles in 1960, and when it moved to the University of New Mexico in 1970 — where he started teaching in 1964 — he became its technical director once again. He has been credited with reviving, inventing new techniques in and expanding the art of lithography in the United States. Antreasian retired from teaching in 1986, after which he turned more often to working in other mediums besides printmaking. Of course, I didn’t know these things when I first saw his work, but I liked the massive forms he was exploring and marveled at the density of his blacks. Whenever I have run across Antreasian’s work in the years since, I have almost always immediately recognized it before glancing at a label, and it is this consistency of his visual vocabulary that most impresses me about his work now. The current retrospective of his works on paper from 1960 to 2007 at Gerald Peters Gallery clearly defines the Antreasian vocabulary: formal, geometric, hardedged, rhythmic, with a preference for blacks and vertical rather than horizontal formats and forms.
The exception is the earliest piece in the show, “The Sea,” a 1960 color lithograph that is (in retrospect) uncharacteristically organic and (gasp!) nearly representational, with the hint of a horizon line across its painterly, splattered-ink surface. It was one of the first prints made at Tamarind in Los Angeles. Henceforth, Antreasian devoted himself to “a greater self imposed rigor, purer geometric and hard-edged minimalized abstraction,” he explains in an artist’s commentary on the works in the exhibit.
The most recent work in the exhibit is “Armen’s Wallpiece,” a charcoal drawing 60 inches tall by 19 inches wide that brings to mind the symmetry of stained glass windows, the columns and arches of Art Deco interiors and the abstract designs of Islamic or Middle Eastern art forms. Five vertical columns, each enclosing squares of geometric patterning — stripes, herringbone, discs — rise to culminate at the top in a sphere, itself containing intersecting stripes. By varying the directions of lines and the intensity of his charcoal, Antreasian evokes depth and color where there is neither; his devotion to balance and symmetry is zealous.
A glance around the gallery demonstrates that these are constant values in his work. And then, just around the wall, is an acrylic on paper of undulating abstract ribbons in a tangle of vivid colors on a brown background. This is surprising, but not for long: the ribbons are of equal width, their curves close in size, the flow is rhythmic. The composition of “Ribbons on a Brown Ground” — the ribbon tangle occupying most of the image area, but shifted down and to the right — is just as balanced as that of “Armen’s Wallpiece.”
One aspect of Antreasian’s vocabulary that has persisted, albeit transformed, over his long career is the use of forms resembling alphabets. He uses these as architectural building blocks for larger shapes, sometimes arranging them formally, on a line, as in his drawing “Untitled (Calligraphy, Black) 1983,” which resembles cyrillic letters. At other times, these letter-like forms are cockeyed, as in “Column E” and “Column F” of 2000, drawings in which he has stacked and overlapped letters into vertical “sculptural” columns that sit on pedestals (sort of Constantin Brancusi meets David Smith). His small acrylic “Structura Series” of 1994 seems to be built of deconstructed letters.
Antreasian’s important lithographic explorations of the late 1970s and early 1980s, wherein he demonstrated his innovations, are represented here. Art historians and printmakers will want to make sure to read the artist’s commentary, available in the gallery, on these pieces. Likewise, the catalog from Antreasian’s 2006 exhibit at Peters, on hand in the gallery and available in the bookstore, includes an excellent essay by William Peterson.
The most appealing of these explorations are a handful of 1980s lithographs in grays and blacks of perfect, evenly inked large triangles and squares atop which the artist drew thin lines of color, straight and curved, intersecting and diverging, as if with a geometry compass. These are airy and elegant.
Larger influences also are clearly visible here: his 1965 color lithography “Ojo” has a Pop sensibility; his 1977 “Untitled (T.76.134)” color lithograph has an Op effect, and so on. But it is in his later works, including his post-printmaking charcoal drawings, that he seems to develop his own style, where the progression of his experiments and explorations coalesce. In the hands of some artists, Antreasian’s obsessions with balance, duality, symmetry and the like could produce that fingernails-on-the-chalkboard effect. Instead, his have a soothing sensibility, proving that in structure we can sometimes find relief and freedom from the chaos that mars so much of our time on Earth.
Contact Hollis Walker at hwalker259@earthlink.net.
If You Go
WHERE: Gerald Peters Gallery, 1011 Paper — 50 Years” Paseo de Peralta
WHEN: Through April 26
CONTACT: 954-5700, www.gpgallery.com
