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Mark Tobey |
On the 2nd of September from 6 to 8 p.m. the Baukunst Galerie opens a major solo-exhibition with works of the American artist Mark Tobey. Since the premiere in 1971 this is already the eighth exhibition of his œuvre at the gallery. The selected originals with an emphasis on the 50s and 60s are completed by loans of national and international private collections. Arnold Stadler, awardee of the Georg-Büchner-Prize, will give an introduction to the exhibition, which is shown until the 23rd of October.
None other artist of the 20st century was such a traveler between continents, cultures and religions as Mark Tobey, who was born in a rural area at the Mississippi in Wisconsin in 1890 and died in Basel in 1976. Early he started to visit the metropolises of the United States from Chicago to New York and Seattle. Later his searching for new artistic impulses led him to England, France, Israel, Mexico and several times to China and Japan before he was invited by Ernst and Hildy Beyeler and settled down in Basel in 1960.
His international reputation became manifest in the ”International Guggenheim Award“ in New York in 1956 and culminated in the decoration with the prize of painting of the Venice Biennale in 1958, which he received as the first American artist after James Whistler. He succeeded with an eminent retrospective exhibition at the Palais du Louvre in Paris in 1961 and a major solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962/63. Since that time Tobey’s works were presented several times at the Venice and Sao Paulo Biennales, at the documenta in Kassel and worldwide in museums as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Beyeler Foundation in Basel. From 2009 to 2010 his works will be shown amongst others at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Tobey’s œuvre is characterized by the productive dialogue between the American and European culture and the art and spirituality of Asia. His acquirement of Chinese calligraphy (1922) and Japanese Zen meditation (1934) leverages his unique style in the painting “Broadway“ in 1935. In the reference field of the Western topic of urban life his duct gets the “calligraphic impulse“ and he gains an insight into the dynamic character of the world, which considerably influenced his artistic development. At this point Tobey becomes aware of the moment of motion in the micro- and macrocosm, applying likewise to the structure of a tree bark and the crowds on the streets of New York. In his meditative, concentrative painting process he starts off with the outside world as origin and then introverts his view in order to detect the universal structure, which all visual phenomena have in common. Thereby he regards to figuration and abstraction as two different ways to configure the essence of the real as his declared ambition of art.
In the progression from the figurative to the abstract Mark Tobey resolves the constructed space long before Jackson Pollock by covering the whole surface of the picture with an “all over” of energetic, superposed strokes interacting with the ground. His formal repertoire in the exhibited works ranges from spirited, calligraphy signs (”The Kabuki Dancers“, 1954) to airy, interleaved, moving lines (”Forms and Change“ and ”Woven City“, both 1965) and crystalline structures (”Apothéosis“, 1954) to perforations (”Untitled“, 1968) and “tints“, which are compacted by multiple color application (”Snowy Evening“, 1968).
These textures unfold in the first place by contemplation. In Tobey’s paintings is not any fixed point of reference. A multiplicity of details and sporadic concentrations keeps our view in motion, floods it and generates a “moving focus”. The gliding through the several layers of the line network opens up a spatial continuum – a “multiple space“. Here the light unfolds in contrast to the darker ground from every selected point in all directions and fills the space with a vibrating energy undulating and rhythmising the image. This visual energy does not only create a fictive, endless space but also enables a complex experience of time. Since the separate linear movements are steadied in the entire motion of the composition, time is revealed as a superposed texture without beginning or ending.
In Mark Tobey’s paintings the futility to fix a detail or an individual shape resolves the rigid confrontation of subject and object and addresses our the inner eye. His works unfold a presence, which is sensual and intellectual at the same time. In our apperception we are carried towards a contemplative way of viewing, where the outer and the inner reality are merged. Ahead modern technology his works intuitively and poetically demonstrate the dynamic interaction and the transitory nature of the physical world.
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