For New Mexico’s Transcendental Painting Group (TPG), making artwork was a dedication and duty that ran far deeper than aesthetics. Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group at the Crocker Art Museum explores the work of this often-overlooked group of Twentieth-century summary artists who pursued enlightenment and non secular illumination amid the dramatic pure environment of the American Southwest.
Based by Raymond Johnson and Emil Bisttram, the artists of the TPG tried to actively join and talk with viewers, inducing a sense of transcendence in those that seen their artwork. They did so by rigorously organized combos of extremely charged — and primarily nonobjective — kinds and colours that they believed had mystical resonance.
In response to TPG spokesperson Dane Rudhyar, in comparison with their fellow summary painters, the group’s accomplishments got here right down to a number of primary variations: “decorative versus psychological, … geometrical abstractions versus living inner experience, [and] mathematical precision versus warmth and radiation of feeling.” Put extra merely, it was a matter of “mind versus soul.”
This sense of objective units TPG work aside from different nonobjective portray of the time and — together with the otherworldly magnificence and high quality of the paintings itself — makes members of the group individually and collectively vital.
One other World, which options roughly 90 works from 11 artists, is the first exhibition exterior of New Mexico to totally survey the TPG and their accomplishments. It goals to supply a broad perspective on the group’s work and significance, together with their function as essential contributors to trendy artwork historical past.
Organized by the Crocker Art Museum and unbiased curator Michael Duncan, One other World is on view in Sacramento, California by November 20, 2022.
For extra info, go to crockerart.org.
