Gestures

“The composition is always present, but one must let things go, be open to improvisation, spontaneity, what’s happening in a space while one works.”

—Sam Gilliam

The second half of the 20th century was defined by a strong impulse for gestures and mark-making that expands into contemporary art. The idea of gesture, traditionally understood as a bodily movement to show a particular meaning, entered into the realm of post-war abstraction opening a pictorial space full of expressive and perceptive possibilities. Sometimes evocative of the emotional and subjective world of the artist and other times as a rebellious act, the use of paint and other materials as the index of the presence of the artist's body results in visual investigations that, more than aiming to project a particular meaning, seek to transform our experience as viewers in front of the work of art.

This online viewing room opens with John Chamberlain’s Once Again Watson, a masterful example from his last decade of work made of scrap metal and paint that projects a gestural abstraction into space. In the 1930s, Pablo Picasso and Julio González pioneered the use of welded iron in the field of modern sculpture with the aim of drawing in the space. In the present sculpture, where Chamberlain uses metal as loaded brushstrokes, the result is a pictorial composition charged with joy and lightness, which one can see as the reenacting of Picasso’s and González's gesture, as its witty title seems to reference.

In the late 1960s Sam Gilliam started staining, folding, and creating marks with paint on canvas and paper inspired by chance and accident. For Gilliam, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1968 meant a transformative course in his artistic practice. “The year 1968 was one of revelation... something was in the air,” the artist declared retrospectively. The two works from 1973 and 1975 included in this viewing room are a mix of screenprint and hand-coloring and are prime examples of Gilliam’s interest in staining and gesture under the basis of seriality and chance. The results are atmospheric compositions in red, yellow, and blue that introduce us into a multidimensional space of levitation.

Since his early abstract paintings from the mid 1950s, Antoni Tàpies is indissociably associated with gestures and mark-making. As one can see in Sinuos, in the 1980s the artist progressed towards the creation of contemplative spaces inspired by his practice of Zen Buddhism. “I do nothing but meditate and paint, meditate and paint,” the artist said in an interview with writer Alan Riding. Sinuos is a large-scale aquatint created with the sole use of two earth tone inks on a black etching paper. The large gesture of the sinuous line at the center of the composition is the artist’s invitation to meditate and reflect on the pulsations of time and silence.

The cool rendering of a gesture of dynamic brushstrokes in white, yellow, and red paint is the subject matter of a screenprint from 1967 that Roy Lichtenstein created as a coda to a series of works reflecting on Abstract Expressionism, his immediate predecessors in the school of New York. The work has been since interpreted as an ironic take on gestural painting, but also as an homage to the generation of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell. Later in his career the artist commented on this series: “it was the way of portraying this romantic and bravura symbol in its opposite style, classicism. The brushstroke plays a big part in the history of art. Brushstroke almost means painting or art.”

Nelo Vinuesa offers a glimpse into the more contemporary use of the gestures explored in this viewing room. While interested in the legacy of gestural painting from the abstract avant-gardes of the 1950s, Vinuesa’s work reflects an interest in painting which is also inspired by animated films, videogames, and computer graphics. The paintings of Vinuesa are built with a recurrent use of mark-making which is not as warm as we see in the works of Tàpies or Gilliam, but not as cold as in Lichtenstein’s.