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Artful Partners Renee Magnanti & Bill Pangburn April 18 ~ May
16, 2006 Curated by Thalia Vrachopoulos, PhD. TENRI CULTURAL INSTITUTE proudly presents Artful Partners: Bill Pangburn and Renee Magnanti from April 18th-May 16th, 2006 with an opening reception on Thursday April 20th, 2006 from 6:30-8:30 PM.
Throughout history there existed many successful art partnerships,
the most famous of which, Kandinsky and Muenther, Hans Arp and Sophie
Teueber, and Sonia Terk with Robert Delaunay, come to mind. As with Pangburn
and Magnanti, all of these consortiums were more than just personal relationships;
they were fruitful and nurturing dialogues and exchanges about art and
career. The Pangburn-Magnanti partnership began when they met in 1978
at Tufts University where they studied art. Pangburn had come from Texas
and Magnanti from Rochester, New York. Although their basic philosophical
beliefs differed, she being spiritual in the Eastern sense where man is
the most insignificant creature in the cosmos, and he being more grounded
in existentialist thought informed by American Transcendentalism, they
resonated as a pair and as artists. Magnanti’s early tightly woven
and pattern-based metal grid-like constructions inspired Pangburn at the
beginning to work in a rectilinear style while later he influenced her
to return to working in a more painterly mode. This pair’s convergences
are found in their use of an abstract vocabulary while their divergences
are evident in their inspirations and specific forms. As a couple they’ve
conducted a painterly dialogue as well as a philosophical discourse that
includes discussion of their development and their works’ underlying
ideas. While Pangburn creates loose painterly forms and engages in the
grand gesture, Magnanti paints tightly woven, planned geometrical detail
oriented works. While Magnanti’s inspirations are ethnographic and
tribal, Pangburn’s subjects are grounded in his influence from the
natural motif. But, although the couple’s vocabulary is abstract
it is full of content not to say that their concerns aren’t also
formal. Pangburn’s Untitled I, 2006 betrays his observations of
the Canadian riverbed which is wide and yellow where dry and red wherever
it is touched by water. It is informed by his visit to the Texas Panhandle,
when flying into Amarillo from the southeast, he saw the snaking Canadian
River. The painterly meandering yellow and rust shapes of this work appear
to swell and constrict in passages as if ebbing and flowing according
to an internal rhythm. Magnanti’s Untitled, 2004 background is loosely
created from thick layered impastos of encaustic paint while the built
up surface layer results in an incised fretted starburst design. Magnanti’s
motifs as in the early works of Kandinsky are culled from ethnographic
designs, or paleoarcheologic microorganisms. Magnanti’s sun motif
has been a popular symbol since earliest antiquity and her red, blue and
yellow are primary colors out of which all others originate. |
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