 From 1967 through the early 1970s, the Californian artist Lewis Baltz (born 1945) made a series of photographs that focuses on the sides of warehouse sheds, stucco walls, empty billboards, and other geometric forms found in the postwar suburban landscape. He titled these works Prototypes, by which he meant both the industrially made model structures scattered across California and the modern culture that generated them. Never before exhibited as a group, the Prototypes are among the earliest works of art to show the fascinating and disturbing transformation of the American landscape into an unending terrain of anonymous commercial architecture.
In the first exhibition dedicated to this series, some 50 Prototypes will be on view along with sculptures by Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd and prints by Richard Serra—key participants in the avant-garde dialogue that inspired Baltz. In addition, the exhibition will include the 12-panel color work Ronde de Nuit (Night Watch) from 1991 to 1992, a mural-sized tableau of surveillance sites and the people who work in them. Dramatically different in scale and appearance from the Prototypes, Ronde de Nuit reveals the artist's continuing preoccupation with industrially manufactured environments and how they are used to control contemporary society.
This exhibition was organized by The Art Institute of Chicago.
The exhibition in Washington is made possible through the generous support of the Trellis Fund.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/baltzinfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
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