Studio Visit with Charles Arnoldi, August 2020

Описание: A day at Charles Arnoldi's studio with the artist working on a recent exploration with some new materials relative to his practice: Styrofoam and plaster. These sculptures and wall pieces are made simultaneously alongside paintings and are meant to be a formal extension of space that exists within a given picture plane.

They also represent an intuitive or natural progression of the Arnoldi's body of work called "Machu Picchu."

Charles Arnoldi (American, b. 1946) has been blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, abstraction and representation throughout his long and celebrated career. Arnoldi started showing his work consisting of compositions crafted from sticks he would gather from orchards and woods. Whether affixed to the canvas in thick clusters or structured into geometric, openwork wall hangings and sculptures, the sticks both resemble and inform the vigorously painted lines that appear in his later paintings. In his more traditional, acrylic-on-canvas paintings, Arnoldi translates nature and architecture into abstract compositions that hint at their source imagery. The history of his work reads, visually, like a long and ongoing dialogue between Arnoldi and color, shape, and form. No matter the medium – whether oils, acrylics, canvas, charcoal, metal, paper, wood, or the burnt sticks from his earliest successful works – Arnoldi sees himself primarily as a maker of objects.

Charles Arnoldi has been making art for over 50 years, first achieving major acclaim in the 1970s. His work resides in numerous collections and museums throughout the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain.