D. Wigmore is pleased to announce its exhibition with catalogue, Op Out of Ohio: Anonima Group, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Julian Stanczak in the 1960s, beginning April 15, 2010. The exhibition featured over 30 paintings from 1959 to 1970 by Richard Anuszkiewicz (b.1930), Julian Stanczak (b.1928), and the three artists of the Anonima Group: Ernst Benkert (b.1928), Francis Hewitt (1936-1992), and Ed Mieczkowski (b.1929). A highlight will be four paintings from the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye, curated by William Seitz, which placed optical, kinetic, and concrete art into one perception-based movement which the press dubbed “Op Art.”
Each of the artists in the exhibition studied or taught at Ohio institutions. Richard Anuszkiewicz and Julian Stanczak met as undergraduates at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the early 1950s before both studied at Yale University with Josef Albers from 1954-1956. Stanczak returned to the Cleveland Institute in 1964 to teach painting, which he did until 1995. Francis Hewitt and Ernst Benkert met as graduate students at Oberlin College in 1959. After meeting as students at Carnegie Tech in the mid-1950s, Hewitt and Ed Mieczkowski both taught at the Cleveland Institute in the early 1960s. Mieczkowski continued to teach there until 1990.
The Anonima Group, all artists interested in the psychology of perception and the European Constructivists, did their first work together at Ernst Benkert’s Springs, Long Island studio the summer of 1960. The group was unique in the United States, but its formation paralleled such European groups as Gruppo N and Gruppo T in Italy; Zero in Germany; and Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visual (GRAV) in France. After several exhibitions in Cleveland, the Anonima Group had its first New York exhibition in 1964. In the winter of 1964-1965 they participated in major exhibitions of perceptual art:Vibrations 11 at Martha Jackson Gallery and Mouvement II at Galerie Denise René in Paris, as well as MoMA’s The Responsive Eye in February 1965. In 1966 the Anonima Group’s project Black/White and Gray 24” Square, with ten paintings by each artist, was exhibited in New York and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and Galeria Foksal in Warsaw. Anonima participated in the New Tendencies exhibitions in Zagreb in 1965 and 1969.
Richard Anuszkiewicz and Julian Stanczak are considered the two students who most embraced Josef Albers’s theories on color interaction. Anuszkiewicz’s work applied the latest findings in color theory and visual perception to measured, geometric compositions of precise linear patterns within gridded or square formats, which often emanate outwards from the center of the canvas. Stanczak applied the same knowledge to nature-inspired compositions of wiggles and juxtapositions of curved and angular forms, which radiate energy and internal illumination. With two different approaches, Anuszkiewicz and Stanczak express the excitement of color and make an event of the act of seeing.
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