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Op Art Eye Candy
I’m lucky that I get to live with a Julian Stanczak painting, bought by my father-in-law in 1968, when Op Art was really something. I saw a show on Stanczak in Chelsea a few years ago, and was blown away that he is still producing Op Art Out of Ohio. Now the D. Wigmore Gallery is having a show on Stanczak, his better-known Yale Art School classmate Richard Anuskiewicz, and several others from the Ohio school.
I love that Stanczak, at least in the 1960s, rarely reverted to the box-in-box motif popularized in airports by Victor Vasarely. His pictures were landscapes, albeit landscapes of shimmering shapes. The Times reviewed it today, and it seems well worth seeing, even if just for contrast, in a season when people are talking about Rothko’s reds and Johns’s stripes.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic, and author of Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities. (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in The Architect's Newspaper, Architectural Record, Dwell, Metropolis, Print, New York Magazine and The New York Times.More >>
DESIGN OBSERVER JOBS
MORE BY Alexandra Lange
05.18.13: Dream Weaver05.14.13: Anxiety, Culture and Commerce
04.24.13: Beyond Gorgeous
04.18.13: Architecture Without Signs
04.09.13: What It Costs (to Buy a Bench, to Extend a Curb)
04.03.13: Portlandia + Timelessness
03.18.13: Instagramming Around Australia
03.07.13: After the Museum: The Tumblr
02.25.13: Founding Mother: Mariana Van Rensselaer and the Rise of Criticism
02.17.13: Patterns of Houston
More by Alexandra Lange >>
BOOKS BY Alexandra Lange
Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and CitiesPrinceton Architectural Press, 2012
Design ResearchChronicle Books, 2010
More books by contributors >>
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On a retrospective of the work of midcentury sculptor Ruth Asawa at Christie's, her first solo show in New York in 50 years.
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A review of Matthias Megyeri's new show at the German Architecture Center, and a review of the question the exhibition inspires: "Are we safer?"
The Deep Roots of Modernism
Accidental Mysteries for April 21, 2013 focuses on the Deep Roots of Modernism.
